| Musique classique |
It is not often that I turn to classical music in these pages. To warrant attention, a recording must bring forward an idea of unusual clarity, performed at a level where craft and imagination converge, a high bar in a field where excellence is both elusive and essential. The clarinetist Nancy Braithwaite’s latest project clears that bar with ease. A program that links composers from the Netherlands and the United States, it frames their music as a cultural bridge, at once intimate in conception and ambitious in scope.
Braithwaite is no newcomer to this terrain. Based in the Netherlands, she has long cultivated collaborations with contemporary composers on both sides of the Atlantic. That history bears fruit here: with the exception of a work by Carlos Micháns, every clarinet piece in this program was written specifically for her and her ensemble. As she puts it, “This CD reflects my deep commitment to the music of contemporary composers and my personal connection with five extraordinary figures from the United States and the Netherlands, my two homelands.” That statement reads less as promotional rhetoric than as a mission: a reminder that contemporary music, often perceived as remote or forbidding, can thrive when framed through relationships of trust and long-term dialogue.
The roster of composers will be new to many listeners: Micháns, Edith Hemenway, Thomas Oboe Lee, Oane Wiersma and Willem Wander van Nieuwkerk. Their works, while stylistically distinct, share a refusal of the superficial. Hemenway’s The Voyage of the Owl and the Pussycat takes its cue from Edward Lear’s nonsense poem, crafting music of wit and gentle surrealism. Lee’s Yo Picasso spans five movements inspired by canvases of the Spanish painter, inviting comparison with Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition but updating the conceit with an ear for sharper harmonic edges and shifting textures. Wiersma and van Nieuwkerk contribute works of contrasting elegance and austerity, while Braithwaite herself emerges as both performer and interlocutor, her playing marked by a combination of technical command and interpretive restraint.
The album’s centerpiece, Wonderings and Other Revelations, written for Braithwaite, reveals the breadth of her artistry: she moves seamlessly from passages of dazzling virtuosity to lines of sober lyricism, giving the impression of an artist as much concerned with substance as with display. That duality, mastery paired with modesty, is part of what makes her performance persuasive.
Contemporary classical music remains, for many audiences, a difficult proposition. Yet this album lowers the barriers without diluting the rigor. The works are accessible not because they pander but because they invite the ear into narratives that feel familiar: voyages, portraits, revelations. In that sense, the project situates itself within a lineage of “program music,” a genre that has long offered listeners a point of entry into unfamiliar terrain.
What emerges is not just a collection of pieces but a statement about transatlantic collaboration. These works belong to no single school or aesthetic camp. Instead, they point to a shared commitment to clarity, discipline and expressive honesty. That commitment, coupled with Braithwaite’s authority on the instrument, makes Wonderings and Other Revelations less a niche project than a persuasive argument for the vitality of contemporary chamber music.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, September 19th 2025
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Artist: Nancy Braithwaite, Vaughan Schlepp, Claron McFadden
Title: Wonderings and Other Revelations
Year Of Release: 2025
Label: Etcetera
Genre: Classical
Quality: flac 24bits – 44.1kHz +Booklet
Total Time: 01:19:57
Total Size: 326 mb
Tracklist
01. Fünf Kommentare zu Ich ruf zu dir
02. The Voyage of the Owl and Pussy-Cat: Embarkation in a Pea Green Boat
03. The Voyage of the Owl and Pussy-Cat: the Land of the Bong Tree
04. The Voyage of the Owl and Pussy-Cat: Wedding Dance by Moonlight
05. Wonderings
06. Caged Bird
07. Songs: I Dwell in Possibility
08. Songs: Fancy
09. Songs: the Writing on a Fallen Leaf
10. Songs: the Lover in Winter
11. Songs: Consider the Grass Growing
12. Songs: Animals
13. Yo Picasso: the Absinthe Drinker
14. Yo Picasso: the Acrobat’s Family
15. Yo Picasso: Les Demoiselles
16. Yo Picasso: Bottle of Bass
17. Yo Picasso: Guernica
18. Sonate for Clarinet, Op. 12: I. Introduzione
19. Sonate for Clarinet, Op. 12: II. Allegro
20. Sonate for Clarinet, Op. 12: III. Adagio
21. Sonate for Clarinet, Op. 12: IV. Vivace
22. Trio Mesticcio: Allegro Assai
23. Trio Nocturne: Tranquillo