Marion Verbruggen - Vivaldi: Seven Concertos (2001)

Marion Verbruggen is known for her magnetic performances, which demonstrate not only her skills as a recorder player, but also her understanding of the repertoire. She makes playing the recorder look effortless, switching easily between the tenor-, alto-, and soprano-voiced instruments during any recital or concert. She can also play florid ornaments, crisp accents, and smoothly liquid passages while maintaining ideal breath control. Verbruggen adds subtlety of shading and vibrancy to her music, having what one reviewer called a "flip sense of articulation." After taking up the recorder as a child, Verbruggen studied at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague with Frans Brueggen, graduating cum laude. She was a prize winner at the first International Recorder Competition in Bruges, and has also received the Erwin Bodky Award for early music and the Nicolai Prize for contemporary Dutch music, showing her appreciation for new music as well as traditional works for the recorder. Verbruggen has even made her own recorder transcription of Bach's Cello Suites. Her performing and teaching tours, and her festival appearances, have taken her to Japan and Australia, as well as all over North America and Europe. Tafelmusik, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and Akademie für alte Musik Berlin are just a few of the ensembles with which she has appeared as soloist. She has also recorded early chamber music with Gustav Leonhardt, Bob van Asperen, Wieland Kuijken, and Lucy van Dael. Her recordings, primarily on the Harmonia Mundi label, include Vivaldi's recorder concertos; Bach's trio sonatas; Ay Amor!, a collection of seventeenth century Spanish music; and two discs of selections from Jacob van Eyck's Der Fluyten Lust-hof. -- Patsy Morita