Michala Petri and Lars Hannibal: Garden Party

OUR Recordings, out September 8

Michala Petri is the world’s leading recorder player and more fun can be found on her latest album, Garden Party, with her long-term musical partner, the guitarist Lars Hannibal. Hearing Petri’s dazzling virtuosity, it’s hard to remember that this delightful music comes from the muchderided recorder we all hated so much at school.

Here it sounds absolutely dazzling in a range of short, descriptive, so-called ‘character pieces’. Some of them are quite well known, such as five transcriptions of Grieg’s delightful Lyric Pieces, originally for piano.

Most, however, are not, like Edouard Lalo’s forgotten and, for decades, lost Fantaisie Norvégienne, originally for violin and orchestra, and drawing on Norwegian folk music.

Then there’s the late Danish cellist Asger Lund Christiansen’s Garden Party, an affectionate portrait of six well-known garden birds, and Carl Nielsen’s Humoresque Bagatelles.

This last piece, in six movements, is eight minutes of pure musical joy; light and breezily melodic.

It’s the sort of music you want to listen to over and over again. And I did.