Publisher's Synopsis
Between 1939 and 1989 the recorder virtuoso Carl Dolmetsch gave 45 concerts at the Wigmore Hall in London, all but a few with harpsichordist Joseph Saxby. The highlight of these concerts was the performance of a specially commissioned work. Many important twentieth-century composers contributed to this corpus of works, including Lennox Berkeley, York Bowen, Arnold Cooke, Gordon Jacob and Edmund Rubbra. This book is the first to explore this repertoire in depth. - - Carl Dolmetsch's contribution to the revival of the recorder in the twentieth century is enormous. Recognizing that the future of the instrument depended on the creation of a modern repertoire, he commissioned works that explored new areas of technique and tonal quality and that opened up fresh possibilities for the recorder as a chamber music instrument. - - Each of the 'Dolmetsch' works is catalogued and discussed in detail. Drawing on much previously unexplored correspondence and manuscript scores held in the Dolmetsch Archive in Haslemere, Andrew Mayes places this music in the wider context of the twentieth-century recorder revival and surveys the influence these works have had on recorder music of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His analyses of the works include composers' programme notes, supplemented where possible with information directly from the composers. The book contains details not just of the Wigmore Hall works but of all the other works composed for Carl Dolmetsch and his children; it also features a select discography.
