Here's a splendid if somewhat more than slightly haphazard
Dohnányi disc. It couples his late Concertino for harp and chamber orchestra from 1952 with his slightly earlier Six Pieces for piano from 1945 and his much earlier Sextet for clarinet, horn, piano, and string trio from 1935, a more or less arbitrary grouping of the orchestral music, chamber music, and solo piano music whose only common thread is that they are all works by the Hungarian expatriate composer. Likewise, it couples a performance by harpist
Sara Cutler with
Leon Botstein leading the American Symphony Orchestra from 2001 with a performance by pianist
Todd Crow from 2004 and a performance by clarinetist Laura Flax, hornist Jeffrey Lang, pianist
Diane Walsh, violinist Erica Kiesewetter, violist
Karen Dreyfus, and cellist Eugene Moye from 2003, a more or less random grouping of musicians and recordings whose only common thread is that they were all done at Bard College where
Botstein is conductor in residence. In fact, aside from the composer and the venue, what all these performances really have in common is their excellence.
Cutler is a breathtakingly beautiful harpist and her performance of the concertino is exceedingly lovely. Flax et al. form a marvelously sympathetic chamber ensemble -- not in itself a huge surprise since some of them are principals in
Botstein's American Symphony Orchestra -- and their performance of the Sextet is surpassingly affecting.
Crow is a tremendously virtuosic pianist and his performance of the Six Pieces is thoroughly impressive. Taken all together, this is a fine
Dohnányi disc. Bridge's sound is transparent yet evocative, a difficult but effective combination.