Donatoni makes a speciality of chamber pieces in which the players pursue and provoke each other. The sparks invariably fly, but they don't always illuminate larger perspectives.
Etwas ruhiger im Ausdruck is the earliest work included. As the title leads one to expect, it's more restrained than the rest, though characteristic of all five pieces to the extent that fragmented, fugitive activity takes place within clearly defined limits. Even this is not young man's music—Donatoni was born in 1927—but it's subtle and fascinating in its inventive way with soft sonontles.
The other works post-date the resolution of a crisis in the composer's development, and differ from Etwas ruhiger im Ausdruck in their wider harmonic range, not excluding hints of traditional consonance. Refrain for eight instruments offers the best example of Donatoni's more relaxed but far from languid later manner. Jazzy rhythms in the double-bass initiate a form in which wind chords (the refrain) and more diverse textures interact with an energy that evokes Stravinsky and even, for a while, Birtwistle. Donatoni's reliance on decorative pattern-making is immediately attractive, but he seems less concerned with more sustained musical argument. The music evolves 'inevitably', because of its quite slow rates of change, but that evolution is not always so interesting as it might be. It never sinks to the merely desultory, even in Spiri for ten instruments, the least successful work included here. But in this idiom brevity is often a virtue and it is the shortest piece, De Pres for voice and five instruments, that runs least risk of outstaying its welcome.
Like Refrain, Fili has a febrility requiring great virtuosity. It seems too anxious to avoid a serious vein, and more in the way of counter-argument to its basic premises would have been welcome. But like all these works it's extremely well performed by members of this excellent Dutch ensemble. The recordings make the players sound very close together, but the advantage is that the full sophistication of Donatoni's resourceful instrumentation is consistently audible.'