Torbjörn Lundquist, Bo Nilsson, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Julius Jacobsen

Featuring: Michael Lind

condition (record/cover): NM / NM

With original innersleeve.

A programme built entirely around the tuba - and around the proposition that the instrument's deep, often overlooked sonority deserves to be heard in the same serious context as any other voice in contemporary music. Caprice Records' release gathers four works for or with tuba in what amounts to a manifesto of the instrument's range: from Ralph Vaughan Williams's Tuba Concerto, which had done as much as any single work to rehabilitate the instrument's standing in the British concert hall, to new Swedish writing by Torbjörn Lundquist (1920-2000) and Bo Nilsson, and a contribution from Julius Jacobsen that completes the survey.

Lundquist was one of the more distinctly individual figures in Swedish post-war composition - a composer whose work occupied the space between neo-Romantic lyricism and a more searching engagement with modern harmonic language, never quite settling into the serial orthodoxy that dominated many of his contemporaries but never retreating from the demands of his own musical logic. Nilsson's contribution, late in his catalogue, brings the same refracted, personal lyricism that marks his mature work. As a document of what the tuba could become in the hands of composers willing to think carefully about its character, this Caprice LP remains an important and undervisited artifact. Caprice, CAP 1143.