Over a period of around 50 years, important creative alliances were forged between Dutch recorder player, flautist, conductor and early music exponent Frans Brüggen and composer Louis Andriessen. In a rich and diverse album featuring old and new music for vocal, solo and instrumental combinations, ‘Tales of Song and Sadness’ attempts to cast a light on these synergies.

Andriessen composed and dedicated several works to Brüggen, the first being Sweet for alto recorder. Premiered in 1964 but heard here in a performance given by Brüggen in 1970, Sweet will come as a bit of a shock to listeners familiar with more established Andriessen works such as De staat and De stijl. The alto recorder is taken out of its Baroque comfort zone and thrown into a world of extended (and often virtuosic) performance techniques, sinuous chromatic lines, complex irrational rhythms and semi-improvised passages. The influence of Andriessen’s teacher, Luciano Berio, especially his Sequenzas, is never far away.

One might be surprised to understand that Un beau baiser, for a cappella choir, was written by the same composer, Andriessen’s luminous vocal lines and bittersweet harmonies suggesting Ravel or Poulenc. Cappella Amsterdam directed by Daniel Reuss give a balanced and nuanced account. A similar (if more disquieting) sound world inhabits the sparse lines of Remembering that Sarabande.

The Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century was founded by Brüggen in 1981, and they join forces with Cappella Amsterdam for Andriessen’s May. Dedicated to Brüggen, who had died in 2014, May also turned out to be Andriessen’s final full-scale work (completed in 2021) before the composer succumbed to Alzheimer’s.

Drawing on excerpts from Dutch poet Herman Gorter’s 1888 epic poem of the same name, May begins with the hope of ‘a newborn springtime and a newborn sound’ but ends with death-rattling rolls on timpani and a desolate-sounding song about sleep and ‘a tale of silence’. In between this life cycle of birth and death, fanfare-like interjections are briefly juxtaposed with magical, dreamlike moments in a fragmentary manner that mirrors both Gorter’s passion-play conception of the text and (one suspects) Andriessen’s ever-increasing self-realisation of his own failing memory.

The album ends with an exquisite performance of Rameau’s Entrée d’Abaris from his opera Les Boréades in a performance given in 2012 by the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century with Brüggen conducting: a fitting conclusion and homage to two towering figures who did much to change the course of both old and new classical music during the second half of the 20th century and early decades of the 21st.