Berg / Messiaen / Nielsen - Solo Alone & More [CD]

SOLO ALONE AND MORE is the first portrait album to present the young clarinet virtuoso Jonas Frolund in a more than hour-long musical journey of works showcasing the instrument beloved and ennobled by composers since Mozart's time. For this album, Frolund selected and perfected a program of works written within the last 100 years. When planning this album, Frolund had three goals in mind - to present himself as a musician with a distinctive vision; to present the clarinet "family" from treble to bass, starting with the familiar concert instruments in Bb and A to the alto (basset) and the bass; and, finally, to present all of the above in music written during a century of New Music, spanning from immediately after WW1 to literally a few months before the recordings took place in June 2021... that is, with one exception: a certain perennially 'new' woodwind solo from a mid-19th century German opera that many observers regard as the mother of all Modern Music - Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. All the music presented on this album is played on a solo clarinet... again, with one exception: in the de Profundis by Simon Steen-Andersen, where the soloist multitasks on a number of percussion instruments as well. Frolund studied at The Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen and at the Conservatoire de Paris and is in high demand as a soloist and chamber musician. He is co-founder of the prize-winning wind quintet V Coloris, and is currently principal clarinet of the Danish Chamber Orchestra under Adam Fischer. In 2021 he took the clarinet world by storm at the international ClarinetFest in a performance described as "electrifying," leaving the audience wanting more, - and his performance of the Mozart Clarinet Concerto with Fischer and the Danish Chamber Orchestra was featured on the BBC Radio 3 Afternoon Concert. Recorded in the DXD audio by one of Denmark's most distinguished audio masters, Mette Due.