Martin Frost

Martin Fröst – Night Passages (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 52:26 minutes | 844 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sony Classical

Night Passages is a nocturnal journey through the mystical and the melancholic, the playful and the profound. The atmosphere of the album, which reinterprets favorite pieces from the Baroque period while also touching on jazz and folk music, carries the mood of nighttime improvisations and deep conversations among friends. An unusual ensemble with original arrangements for clarinet, bass and piano, arranged by Martin Fröst and his trio colleagues.
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Martin Fröst – Vivaldi (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 58:50 minutes | 1,10 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sony Classical

Martin Fröst is an internationally renowned clarinettist and conductor ‘Vivaldi’ is a baroque adventure based on the question: What might Vivaldi have composed for the clarinet if it had been more fully developed? For this recording three clarinet concertos have been newly composed, made up of music drawn from Vivaldi’s most beautiful opera and oratorio arias Performed on the mellow, songlike chalumeau – the predecessor of the modern clarinet – and the brilliant, virtuosic clarinet of today, Martin Fröst and Concerto Köln create a won- derful symbiosis between the old and the new The album is complemented with two popular sinfonias by A. Vivaldi and one new air com- posed for chalumeau ‘Vivaldi’ was recorded with Grammy award winning baroque ensemble Concerto Köln

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Martin Fröst – Roots (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:03:04 minutes | 1,11 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sony Classical

The clarinetist Martin Fröst, after a series of recordings of modern-ish Nordic and Germanic clarinet repertory on the Swedish label BIS, gets a larger mouthpiece here with a release on the major Sony Classical label. Fröst’s playing has never been better: he excels in both tough, angular lines and slow cantabile, and both are applied here to a wide variety of material. Three of Schumann’s Five Pieces in Folk Style, Op. 102, are made into a little sonata here, and sampling any one of them (tracks 7-9) will show you how compelling Fröst can make only moderately interesting music. Like those pieces, most of the music is arranged from music in media other than clarinet and orchestra. It circles around the theme of folk “roots” in classical music, with some very colorful treatments of traditional music as well as Bartók and a range of other pieces from Telemann to Piazzolla (an especially successful arrangement that sticks close to the original La muerte del Angel) and contemporary music. The range is very wide, and Fröst holds it together impressively. A couple of traditional pieces are given a gauzy choral backing; Fröst may have felt that such a crossover gesture was necessary in a major-label environment, but in this cast it detracts from a tightly constructed musical argument that could have stood better on its own. On balance, however, this will be a fine introduction for many listeners to one of the great instrumentalists of the present day.

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