SACDs - Hummel, J

The Hungarian trumpet player Gábor Tarkövi comes from a family of mainly brass playing musicians and switched from clarinet to trumpet. Since 2005, he has been the solo trumpet player in the Berlin Philharmonic; “In this orchestra I work with wonderful colleagues, who always inspire me. That is a very lovely feeling.”

Franz Krommer’s wind music dates from a golden age of wind music composition, a time where profound sentiments, intellectual discourse, and delicacy of expression in instrumental music was not seen to be the sole domain of strings or piano. As all of Krommer’s superlative wind music, the quartets Op. 46 are highly instrumentally idiomatic and often virtuosic. They exploit the full three octave range of the period bassoon to dramatic effect, use a full palette of tonal colours and textures, and feature many different effects at which the bassoon excels; running staccato figures, wide intervallic leaps, as well as soaring tenor cantabile lines. The Island Quartet was founded in 1999 in order to explore the unjustly neglected early 19th century repertoire for bassoon, violin, viola and cello, on the instruments of the era.

Gansch studied the trumpet from the age of ten and is a trumpet professor at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg. He gives solo concerts and master classes in Austria and abroad. His CD Trumpet Concertos received the German Record Critics’ prize in 1995.

The young trumpet virtuoso Tine Thing Helseth came to the attention of audiences and critics when she was awarded 2nd prize in the 2006 Eurovision Young Musicians finale in Vienna. With her debut CD, which includes a stunningly fresh new recording of the ever-popular Haydn concerto as well as terrific performances of works by Albinoni, Hummel and Neruda, she seems destined to take the world of classical music by storm.