Throughout her extraordinary career, Michala Petri has embraced the entirety of the recorder’s repertoire, from the Baroque to the 21st century. Yet, her great mission has been to bring her simple instrument into the modern concert hall as a solo instrument in front of the symphony orchestra. Danish and Faroese Recorder Concertos is the latest installment in Michala’s ongoing “Concerto Project”, (previous releases include Chinese Recorder Concertos (6220603), English Recorder Concertos (6220606) and the Grammy-nominated Movements (6220531)), presenting new works especially composed for her, from an international roster of some of the greatest contemporary composers. For this latest installment, she turns her attention to the works of her native Denmark.
For most of the 20th century, Danish music was somewhat isolated from the innovations happening on the continent, but beginning in the 1960s, young composers began to experiment and explore, and in the following decades, created their own distinctively modern Danish style. The three works featured here provide just a sample of the rich and colorful diversity of Danish and Faroese contemporary music; from the late Thomas Koppel’s tender, tonally-centered Moonchild’s Dream, to Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, the dean of Danish composers, and his darkly humorous Chacun Son Son, to the vigorous and atmospheric 20-minute bird-cadenza for recorder and orchestra, Territorial Songs, by the internationally acclaimed Faroese composer Sunleif Rasmussen.
