Five of the world’s top wind players have formed chamber music’s equivalent of The Three Tenors to record an absolute pearler of a double album. Going under the name Les Vents Français, flautist Emmanuel Pahud, Paul Meyer, clarinet, Francois Leleux oboe, Gilbert Audin, bassoon, and Radovan Vlatkovic, french horn, are all star soloists in their own right. Together they are magic.

The set kicks off with a light and air-filled soufflé in the form of Jacques Ibert’s Trois pièces brèves. This is highly accessible music composed during the inter-war years as an antidote to the heavier fare of modernism. Much of Ravel’s piano music transcribes beautifully for chamber ensembles and American horn player Mason Jones’ arrangement of Le Tombeau de Couperin shows off the group’s matchless balance and flawless intonation.

Andre Jolivet (1905-1974) was greatly influenced by both Varèse and Bartók and his 1963 Sonatine for oboe and bassoon slides playfully between keys like a witty conversation between these two instruments. This leads seamlessly into Darius Milhaud’s nod to the 15th century troubadour era, La Cheminée du Roi René, seven exquisite sketches with acrobatic flute and oboe lines depicting jugglers and jousting knights and a serene madrigal/nocturne suggesting a chivalrous tryst on the banks of the River Arc. 

The first album closes with the father of French wind music, Claude-Paul Taffanel. His Wind Quintet in G Minor is a showcase for the talents of Pahud. The work has an operatic ambience and composer was principal flute with the Paris Opera when he wrote it for a competition. It won and Taffanel went on to establish a society for wind players and a tradition for French chamber music of this genre.

After the splendours of French wind music you might expect the second disc of 20th century wind quintets to be an anti-climax. Not a bit of it. With Paul Hindemith’s wonderful Kleine Kammermusik, rich in nods to Bach and jazz infusions at its climax, neatly counterbalanced by György Ligeti’s entertaining Six Bagatelles, this is the perfect companion disc.

Ligeti’s work, written in 1953, includes a lovely little adagio mesto memorial to Bartók, who taught Ligeti’s teacher, Swiss/Hungarian composer Sándor Veress. Like Bartók and his other teacher Kodaly, Veress did some research into Hungarian, Transylvanian and Moldavian folk music and you can hear these influences in his Sonatina for oboe, clarinet and bassoon. The playlist is completed by the only non-European work on the program, Samuel Barber’s Summer Music.

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