Britten / Ensemble Allegria - Music For String Orchestra [CD]

Ensemble Allegria presents here a combination of works as an invitation to enjoyment as well as reflection. We are offered variations, metamorphoses and fragments, three different artistic working concepts. Variation and metamorphosis are similar artistic tools inasmuch as the material to be used is workable and encourages modification. At the same time, the basic material is recognizable or, in any case, reconstructible. Music cannot be created out of nothing. Whether deliberate or not, we find metamorphosis and variation in all compositions of a certain scope. Of course in the works heard here the motif of transformation is intended. And whereas musical variations - as with Benjamin Britten - typically retain a theme's form and length more or less unaltered, a metamorphosis - as Richard Strauss calls his work - can by contrast pertain to everything from the shortest motifs to entire movements. A fragment - a form often associated with Romanticism - is on the other hand an idea that has not reached a final form and remains an intimation of something more. Lars Petter Hagen's Strauss Fragments were commissioned by Ensemble Allegria.