Fugue Around the Clock.(Sound Recording Review)

Amsterdam Loeki Stardust Quartet. Channel Classics CCS 19498, 2003.

The Amsterdam Loeki Stardust Quartet is to the recorder consort something like what the Kronos Quartet has been to the string quartet--a group willing both to celebrate the traditions that have nurtured its chosen ensemble form and to run over those traditions with a truck, if doing so will likely prove musically interesting and rewarding. Kronos was famous for commissioning string quartet arrangements of Jimi Hendrix songs; the Amsterdam Loeki Stardust Quartet won the 1981 Musica Antiqua Competition with an arrangement of a Stevie Wonder song. The latter group's commercial recordings, however, have generally been less adventurous than those of Kronos, if no less impressive. This one finds the quartet presenting an historical overview of the fugue, a compositional technique that first emerged in the fourteenth century and began to reach maturity in the seventeenth. The earliest example provided here is an anonymous caca from ...