Really glad to have finally listened to this marvellous release (from June last year). Henri Dutilleux’s score for the ballet Le Loup (The Wolf, 1953) makes for compelling listening, colourful and unfailingly inventive music of vivid narration, with allusions to Gershwin, Poulenc and Prokofiev – superbly played and captured with complementary recorded sound courtesy of Ralph Couzens. No-less-inspired are Kenneth Hesketh’s recent orchestrations of Dutilleux’s Sonatine (for Flute and Piano), Sonate (for Oboe and Piano), and Sarabande et Cortège (for Bassoon and Piano), all beguiling. No easy task, one imagines, to re-score music by such a painstaking composer as Dutilleux (1916-2013) who laboured over each note, timbre and every marking. Hesketh’s decisions convince and enchant the ear, as does the music anyway, now persuasively expanded, and find the respective soloists – Adam Walker, Juliana Koch, and Jonathan Davies – in expressive, sparkling and virtuosic form. Chandos CHSA 5263 [SACD].
John Wilson & Sinfonia of London record Henri Dutilleux’s music for Chandos – Le Loup, and Kenneth Hesketh’s Dutilleux orchestrations.
