cd review - T H E L E M A . . .

"A good book should grab your complete attention right from the very first sentence. And I believe the same should happen with a CD: as soon as I hear the first notes, I want to have the feeling that I can’t tear my ears away until I have heard it all. Ideally you should be able to listen to a CD as if you were at a concert.
And this is what happens to me when I listen to the Thelema Trio’s CD.
It means never being tempted to skip ahead to the next track. Juan María Solare has you on the edge of your seat right from the start, and his piece is followed by music so varied that your attention never wanes.
From colourful madness to the most intense music. From Italian lyricism to rhythms reminiscent of Stravinsky, from impressionism to insanity and back to meditation. It’s a treat for the ears. And it is not just the compositions by Juan María Solare, Giorgio Colombo Taccani, Luca Vanneschi, Ward De Vleeschhouwer, Philemon Mukarno, Korneel Bernolet, Hans-Henrik Nordstrøm and Peter Verdonck that make this CD a pleasure to listen to, but above all the superb playing by the trio. If all new CD’s could reach this high level, there would be far more reason to listen to contemporary music."

Harry Sparnaay, bass clarinettist

 

The conference was preceded by an unusual and most interesting concert by the Thelema Trio of Belgium on Wednesday evening. The evening's fare consisted of works written especially for the trio by one of its members or others. Each of the players, Ward De Vleeschhouwer (piano and electronic keyboard), Peter Verdonck (alto, tenor and baritone saxophone) and Marco Antonio Mazzini (clarinet, bass and contrabass clarinet), made each new mix of instruments work like a charm and seemingly switched effortlessly among their instruments without a glitch. All of the works presented on this concert were from Europe or South America and represented composers who had written works especially for the trio to play on this concert as part of a tour of the US and South America. The works presented offered a very wide range of styles, new performance techniques, and a chance for each performer to really shine and strut performance chops that seemed endless and yet continued to grow with each new piece we heard."

Greg A Steinke
(concert review of the Society of Composers, Inc. National Conference presented by the School of Music, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, October 12–15, 2005) © 2005