Fire Walker

Fire Walker is Marion Walker‘s debut album, and the first album in The Elements series, as part of Lawo Classics’ ongoing collaboration with Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra’s alternating solo oboist.

The album is Exclusively Available at NativeDSD in Stereo DSD 512, DSD 256, DSD 128, DSD 64 and the recorded format and bit rate of Stereo DXD.

In an important role on this album, she has brought with her the award-winning violinist Sara Övinge, former concertmaster of Den Norske Opera & Ballett, who leads the strings in the quintet and quartet on this album. Participating musicians are violist Anders Rensvik, clarinetist Ingvill Hafskjold, cellist Gunnar Hauge and double bassist Marius Flatby.

Quintet, Op. 39
Prokofiev’s chamber music output is relatively modest—a handful of sonatas, two string quartets, an overture of Hebrew themes for clarinet, string quartet and piano, as well as this quintet for oboe, clarinet, violin, viola and bass.

The quintet, with its peculiar instrumentation and its tonal and rhythmic playfulness— described by some as “successfully circusy”—is a prime example of Prokofiev as an ironist and humorist, a superb craftsman who elegantly juggles his material and produces surprisingly sonorous, tonal and rhythmic kaleidoscopes. The work is one of his most radical, but the crassness of the elements is placated by the lightness of the form—like a kind of polite insolence.

Bælþræk, Quartet for Oboe, Violin, Viola and Cello (2016) / Bælsiþ, Concerto for Oboe and Sinfonietta (2018)
Humour has long been a central ingredient in Jon Øivind Ness’s music, ever since he put his perilous life as a cat owner to music in the trombone concerto Dangerous Kitten (1997). In recent years, his music has transformed significantly, from the complex irony of the 90s, via the almost—to quote the composer himself—romantic fervor of the mid-00s, to a microtonally oriented musical language and occasionally ascetic expression in the last 10 years or so.

Marion Walker, Oboe
Ensemble Ernst