Poul Ruders: Rudersdal Chamber Players

I've very much enjoyed these chamber music pieces written over a period straddling three decades, the clarinet and piano piece "Throne" from 1988 through the "Clarinet Quintet" (2014) and the "Piano Quartet" (2016).

Ruders is a self-taught composer. His language is largely tonal, but definitely modern, reveling in contrasts and sharp atonal outbursts. No, I'm not being entirely contradictory here in this statement, but to understand you'll need to listen. In sum, I've enjoyed this album immensely and will now seeking more of Ruders' recorded compositions. Highly recommended.

Playing the clarinet is lush. The musical gesture is playful, but also thoughtful. The music can dance. But it can also become dreamy soft.

Would Johannes Brahms have composed like this if he had lived today? No, self-consequently not exactly like that. Anyway, the Danish composer Poul Ruders' chamber music works on a new album from the Rudersdal Chamber Players are just as safely written as Brahms' chamber music works from the 1800s. That's a bit of a praise. But they actually are.

Poul Ruders can write for an orchestra, but in his intimate chamber music works, three of which can be experienced on this new album, it is for the first time the excellent composition craftsmanship that strikes one. This is the sound of today, one thinks immediately. It was only at the second listening that I realized how unbelievably uncomfortable the low-measure of the slow rate of Ruders' clarinet quintet is. Whisper! What are we actually looking into here? Something strange electric clay something really bad?

It is the clarinet, Brahms' favorite instrument in his late chamber music works, that is in focus. In Ruder's long work "Throne" takes the leading role, and the composer won't say which throne it is. This long, mysterious piece for clarinet and piano is a silent 'Game of Thrones', where the listener has to poem themselves out of a hand-full cue. Elevation, Unity, Diamonds, Crown ... that's all we have to look for.

But that's enough too! Ruders, the horror master among Danish composers, unfolds in these works for few instruments like the dreamer - and at the same time the craftsman who really knows how to write for the various instruments, as heard in his quartet of piano and strings.

Something is waking up. Some people are dreaming. Something gestures, and like in the other works on the album, the music ends up calming down. Is this beautiful? Or disturbing? At first it just sounds like solid chamber music. An update on what the grand master of the field, good old Brahms, could accomplish. But what did Johannes see, to now return to the title of Poul Ruders' scary and effective apocalypse work from the 1980s? He saw pale riders, death and judgment day.

Listen to it again - and feel the shudder. This is an album you need to listen to multiple times. You will be rewarded for it. Also because the musicians in the Rudersdal ensemble with the outstanding young clarinetist Jonas Frølund up front play really well.