Nice use of an unusal set of instruments
Michael Lichter | Buffalo, NY USA | 08/27/2009
(4 out of 5 stars)
"A few days ago, my wife's mother sent us an article about Carleen Hutchins, who died on August 18, 2009, and her effort to remake the violin family. Intrigued, I sought out the Hutchins Consort and found this album. I'm happy to say that it's quite nice.
As you might expect, the consort's sound lies somewhere between that of a string quartet and that of a small chamber orchestra. Two things that distinguish the consort playing the eight-instrument "new violin family" from a string octet (a double-quartet, with two cellos, two violas, and four violins) is that the low end is lower (owing to two instruments that dip below the bottom of the cello) and that there is more variation in timbre (owing to the fact that you have eight instruments, each a different size, compared to only three in the octet) resulting in a sound that suggests a larger and more varied ensemble.
As for the music itself, the album's title is a reference both to the lifetime of Norweigan playwright Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754) and to Edvard Grieg's much later (1884) suite "From Holberg's Time," based on dances popular during that period. Correspondingly, most of the album consists of typical baroque chamber pieces by Italian contemporaries of Holberg, and the final five tracks are from Grieg's suite.
The musical selections and their arrangements are pleasant, enjoyable, and well-suited to the instruments. The overall impression is sedate but not boring. The impressively resonant low-end instruments stand out on most of the tracks. The high-end instruments get less play, possibly because they can get a little screechy (as evidenced by tracks on another album). Whether or not the instruments sound as good as Stradavarius' is not a question I'm qualified to answer, and I doubt it would be answerable outside of side-by-side live performance, but they do sound good.
Bottom line: Try it, you'll probably like it."
