Recorder31 Day 18 | Side-By-Side Interview: Walter van Hauwe & Dorothee Oberlinger

Our third Side-By-Side interview for Recorder31 features two stalwarts of the European recorder scene. Witnessing the recorder scene change over a period of decades provides a fascinating viewpoint, and the combined experience of our two guests today offers a huge bank of knowledge from which to draw upon for an interview.

Walter van Hauwe has been teaching at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam since 1971, and is perhaps best known for his collaborations with Frans Brüggen and Kees Boeke in the ensemble Sour Cream. His tutor books 'The Modern Recorder Player' are amongst the definitive volumes for recorder players exploring contemporary repertoire. While teaching at Amsterdam, one of the students he encountered was Dorothee Oberlinger. Since winning the SRP/Moeck Solo Recorder Competition in 1997, Dorothee has become a hugely prominent soloist and recording artist, working with ensembles and orchestras around the world, including Ensemble 1700 which she directs. She also teaches at the Mozarteum in Saltzburg, a position she has held since 2004.

Walter and Dorothee took the time to reflect on their careers, including discussions of their teaching roles, working with new repertoire for the recorder, and indeed the very name of the instrument, in a thoughtful and insightful interview.

Listen to the interview in full here:

About the artists

Dorothee Oberlinger is one of the most amazing discoveries of recent years, an expressive virtuoso who - quite rightly - received numerous awards while still quite young. Today she is seen as one of the best recorder-players in the world. Her concerts have been received with enthusiasm by critics and audiences alike, earning her unanimous acclaim. Her CDs are regularly fêted as the best new issues on the market. She has been the guest soloist with leading international Baroque ensembles such as London Baroque and Musica Antiqua Köln directed by Reinhard Goebel, and she also plays regularly with modern symphony orchestras such as the WDR-Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester and the Detmolder Kammerorchester. Dorothee directs her own "Ensemble 1700", which she formed in 2003. Together they have realized a wide variety of projects relating to the music of the 17th and 18th centuries. www.dorotheeoberlinger.de

Walter van Hauwe is a blockflute player and music teacher. He was born in the Dutch city of Delft on 16 November 1948. He studied under Frans Brüggen at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague where he graduated with honours in 1969. Van Hauwe played traditional blockflute-literature not only as a soloist but also as a member of several specialised ensembles. In 1971 Van Hauwe co-founded, with Frans Brüggen and Kees Boeke, the controversial, experimental blockflute-ensemble Sour Cream. The discoveries made here on blockflute-techniques and interpretation of a great variety of music styles, covering a period over six centuries, were ordered and written down by Van Hauwe in a three-volume professional method: ‘The Modern Recorder Player'. These books were published between 1981 and 1985 by Schott London and have been translated in multiple languages.

From 1972 on, Van Hauwe was connected to the Conservatory of Amsterdam as a professor for blockflute. Here he set up in 1975 up a controversial education system that attracted many students from all over the world. Partly because of this success he received in 2002 the prestigious Dutch Prins Berhard Music Award for his complete oeuvre, after which the Conservatory of Amsterdam offered him the position of Head of Education Development. www.waltervanhauwe.org

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The Sound of Recorder Music!

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