Showcase for versatility of recorder

Alison Baldwin @ John Innes Centre, Colney

By CHRISTOPHER SMITH

This was the 19th of the University of East Anglia's annual Dorothea Hare Young Musicians concerts, and Alison Baldwin fitted the bill quite admirably. She has been a student of Ross Winters since she was 12, and was in the sixth form at Norwich High School for Girls. After first class honours in music and German at Royal Holloway, she returned to Norwich and has gained a distinction in her masters at the UEA.

Her delightful and remarkably wide-ranging recital of recorder music showed her skill, while illustrating the past of her instrument and arguing it has a great future.

An additional feature was her readiness to turn from one member of the recorder family to another. The reward was a succession of intriguing changes in tone.

The Renaissance was represented by “divisions”, rapidly moving variations on once-familiar tunes that called for deft fingers and precise tonguing.

Corelli's rather later La Follia was more substantial, but still glorying in technique.

From the 20th century repertory the Sonatina by Edmund Rubbra was especially interesting since the composer seemed to become more and more aware of the potential of the recorder as the movement went on.

Alison let her hair down for echoes of the outback in Benjamin Thorn's Voice of the Crocodile.