Armin Rosin

Featuring: Mauricio Kagel, Luciano Berio

condition (record/cover): NM / NM. | A recital that makes the case for the trombone as a solo instrument of the first rank, performed by Armin Rosin - for decades the principal trombonist of the Südwestfunk-Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden and one of the most important advocates for new music for his instrument. The programming is characteristically bold: three rarely heard works from the Romantic and early modern repertoire on Side A, two of the most demanding pieces in the contemporary trombone literature on Side B.

The first side opens with Camille Saint-Saëns's Cavatine in D-flat major Op. 144 (1916), a late work of deceptive simplicity - Saint-Saëns at eighty-one, writing for an instrument he understood with a craftsman's precision. Carl Maria von Weber's Romanze in C minor follows, a sustained Andante sostenuto that exploits the trombone's capacity for dark, vocal lyricism - one of the earliest significant solo works for the instrument. Sigismund Stojowski's Fantaisie in E major Op. 27 (1905) is a genuine rarity: a virtuoso concert piece by the Polish pianist-composer, a pupil of Delibes and friend of Paderewski, almost entirely forgotten today. David Levine accompanies throughout with the intelligence and sensitivity that made him one of the most sought-after collaborative pianists in Germany.

Side B is another world entirely. Luciano Berio's Sequenza V (1966) for solo trombone is one of the landmark works of the postwar avant-garde - dedicated to the great Stuart Dempster, it demands that the player simultaneously play and vocalize into the instrument, creating a kind of interior theatre in which the trombonist becomes actor, clown and singer. The instruction "as if on a stage" runs through the score. It is followed by Mauricio Kagel's Atem für einen Bläser (1969/70) in its 1974 version for trombone - nearly thirteen minutes in which the act of breathing itself becomes the subject of the music. Kagel strips the instrument back to its most fundamental physical reality: air passing through a tube, the body of the player as the primary sound source. Together, the Berio and the Kagel form one of the most powerful statements on record of what the trombone became in the hands of the postwar European avant-garde.

LP with trilingual liner notes (German, English, French) by Armin Rosin. Released on Teldec (Telefunken-Decca), 1980. Made in Germany.