Chamber music works for trombone are sparse. Especially between baroque and contemporary music, there is a large gap. Jörgen van Rijen, solo trombonist of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, and the Alma Quartet, fill the gap with arrangements of the standard repertoire for trombone and string quartet. Van Rijen’s polished playing always captures the essence of a piece – tragic beauty in a lament by Fauré, sunshine in Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, deep melancholy in Satie’s Gnossienne No. 1.
The outstanding (collaborative) playing turns these retellings of well-known pieces into delightful rediscoveries. Van Rijen pairs them with contemporary compositions, written or arranged for this quintet, which surprise with their stylistic diversity. Martijn Padding’s Schumann’s Last Procession is a bumbling, moving portrait of the composer as a psychiatric patient. Notable is Nico Muhly’s All Perfections Keep, a series of inventive variations on a song by John Dowland. Virtuoso Van Rijen glides and shimmies through the dazzling final number, Rock That Trombone by Chiel Meijering.
Composers in the crosshairs of our attention