Lars Hannibal, [Blue], Compositions and Arrangements by Lars Hannibal

 

Some contemporary music has a timeless feel to it. That's certainly true of composer-guitarist Lars Hannibal's [Blue], Compositions and Arrangements by Lars Hannibal (OUR Recordings 8.226914). The program contains ten short compositions by Lars and then 8 Danish songs arranged for recorder and guitar, two by Carl Neilson plus others by lesser-known composers.

Four musical voices variously give us this music, principally Lars on classical guitar and Michala Petri on recorder, but then also three songs for guitar and recorder plus the lovely voice of Amalie Hannibal Petri and the cello of Agnete Hannibal Petri. Those songs are quite feelingful, with a sweetness that is in many ways a product of Amalie's almost Astrud Gilberto-like tenderness, and then just as much the idiomatically felicitous, the quite natural charm of the songs themselves.

The instrumental compositions and song arrangements have tonal resonance and guitar-recorder historicity that touch on almost Dowlandesque-through-to-classical-and-beyond guitar underpinnings without directly referencing so much as atmospherically paralleling such things.

The basic recorder-guitar format that occupies most of the album time excels thanks to the vibrancy of the compositions and the fine shadings of the two instrumentalists. That is true of the Hannibal pieces and then in slightly different ways of  the rearranged Danish songs--by Thorvald Aagaard, Thomas Laub, Carl Nielsen, Franz Gebauer, Oluf Ring, and C.E.F. Weyse. The music covers tonal territory that gives Lars and Michala new expressive possibilities and fleshes out the program further in happy ways.

There is a real place for this CD in your listening cycle I suspect. It you want a jolt of songful tonal fare that enhances your mood with subtlety and always with high musicality, well then here you go. I could easily scarf up an entire album of the songs with Amalie P. and quartet but the three here act as signposts showing the way through the substantial songful landscape while they punctuate the rest of the program which is very nice indeed. Recommended.