AVAILABILITY
www.newworldrecords.org
The earliest work here
is Deux Preludes, written in 1966. Husa’s
ever-challenging but enlivening sonorities
are generated with utter accomplishment
and timbral imagination. There is even
a vestige of neo-classicism in the central
agitato of the first Prelude, with the
outer panels retaining a rather quiescent
organic growth. In the second Prelude
we hear constant interplay of the three
voices and changes of tempi – plenty
of mutation, including moments of coiling
intimacy and ending in a flurry. Five
Poems explores birdcalls though not
by direct imitation (even if Husa has
admitted that he might have done so
had not Messiaen got there first). Husa
writes evocatively for fulsome clarinet,
embraces a melancholy, grave horn for
a funereal movement, charges the writing
with multi-hued vivacity and fractiousness
for a fight and wingless empyrean serenity
for the final movement, Bird Flying
High Above, with its soaring vantage
in the motionless high.
Recollections dates
from 1992 and is written for wind quintet
and piano. Amongst the most extreme
writing on the disc is the Andante that
depicts a rain shower and its variations
of patterns. The moderato is almost
atonal and has guttural horn blasts
to disrupt the ear whilst the fifth
movement Vivace has piano treble flecked,
flickering and elusive. The last movement
comes as a kind of balm after the divisive
and taut drama of these movements. Husa’s
delightful Serenade ends the disc with
a degree of lyric impressionism fused
with late Romantic, almost Mahlerian
compression. Not only that but there
are some baroque figures as well that
add gravity and nobility to the textures.
Performances are rightly
expert – plenty of colour and abrasion
where necessary. The booklet notes have
covered a range of published and unpublished
sources and quote wisely from Husa’s
own writings. Some of these works are
tough, sinewy and difficult – but much
is toughly sensitive.
Jonathan Woolf
Quintet of the Americas/Perspectives Ensemble/David
Gilbert (conductor) 
