A listening experience of the highest order

"An album featuring virtuosic wind pieces with piano accompaniment runs the risk of becoming a circus-like display of extreme technical difficulty—and quickly becoming tedious. Alternatively, a duo might know how to employ subtle stylistic nuance, sharpen contrasts, and craft lyrical moments of repose with the same care given to bravura passages.

This album meets those demands perfectly, transforming what could have been a mere parade of high-octane virtuoso showpieces into a listening experience of the highest order. Anastasia Schmidlin’s performance—characterized by rapid-fire agility, incisive articulation, singing phrasing, and a beautifully balanced tone across all registers—stands up to any comparison.

It opens with Alexander Rosenblatt’s inventive Carmen Fantasy, a work that moves beyond the mechanics of classical figural variation to transport Bizet’s melodies into a jazzy setting. Performed with such pointed musicality, the neoclassical pieces by Jean Françaix and Eugène Bozza sound fresh rather than academic.

Philippe Gaubert’s Fantaisie is a significant work, representing a synthesis of late- or post-Romantic idioms, (post-)Impressionism, and neoclassical restraint—qualities also found in the music of Albert Roussel, a friend of Gaubert’s.

Klezmer music—popularized by Giora Feidman—adds another delightful dimension to the mix: ‘Sholem Alekhem, Rov Feidman’ is a composition by Béla Kovács, who served for many years as a clarinet professor in Budapest and Graz and authored a seminal clarinet method book. In his teaching, Kovács consciously incorporated performance styles that lay outside the classical-academic tradition. Here, Anastasia Schmidlin gives free rein to her temperament, capturing the characteristic Klezmer sound—with its glissando-like sobs—that so closely mirrors the human voice."

pizzicato, 18.06.2026, Ingo Dorfmüller