Due to unforeseen circumstances, Marion Verbruggen has decided to withdraw from her scheduled performances with Ensemble Mirable the weekend of April 10–12, 2015. The Ensemble is thrilled that Dan Laurin is available to take her place. SFEMS has presented the distinguished Swedish recorder virtuoso on our concert series before as a solo artist, and we are delighted to welcome him back.
Dan Laurin certainly ranks among the greatest recorder players active anywhere in the world today. Laurin’s formidable technique (he is especially admired for his ability to produce a wide range of tone colors and dynamics) is matched by a distinctive interpretive style, combining thoughtful musical structure with highly wrought ornamentation and a sometimes wild sense of fantasy. His facility at improvisation evokes jazz greats like Charlie Parker, while honoring the aesthetics of 17th- and 18th-century music.
He has been a prolific recording artist and performer, covering the recorder’s historical repertory, from the major sonatas and concertos of Handel, Vivaldi, and Telemann (including two recently-discovered Telemann sonatinas) to contemporary music, both 20th-century classics of recorder literature and newly commissioned works, among them a half-dozen concertos. Special mention should be made of his 9-CD set of the complete Der Fluyten Lust-hof, Jacob van Eyck’s monumental, mid 17th-century collection, which remains the largest work in European history ever written for a wind instrument. Laurin’s much-praised recording was itself a landmark and a unique accomplishment.
Laurin also had a long and fruitful collaboration with the late, legendary Australian instrument maker Frederick Morgan, to replicate historical recorders of various craftsmen from different eras. Among these was a special instrument designed to perform Der Fluyten Lust-hof.
A member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, he has been honored with many awards for his recordings and performances, including a GRAMMY®, the Society of Swedish Composers’ prize for the best interpretation of contemporary Swedish music, and the Litteris et Artibus medal from the King of Sweden.
Laurin is also an active teacher, holding professorships at The Carl Nielsen Academy of Music, Odense; The Conservatory of Music in Gothenburg, Sweden; and the Royal Conservatory of Music in Copenhagen. Recently, he was appointed to positions at Stockholm’s Royal College of Music and at Trinity College in London. He researches and lectures on many areas of interpretation, music aesthetics, recorder acoustics, sound techniques, and performance issues. Laurin has inspired and trained some of the leading young recorder virtuosi in Europe and beyond. As a young man he reinvented the recorder as a vehicle of the highest artistic expression, and his playing continues to delight, challenge and enthrall audiences and fellow-musicians across the world.
