The Romantic Flute

The Romantic Flute César Franck (1822 – 1890) Jeffrey Khaner, flute Sonata in A major for flute and piano 25:00 Hugh Sung, piano 12 Allegretto ben moderato 5:03 13 Allegro 7:22 14 Recitativo-Fantasia Charles-Marie Widor (1844 – 1937) Ben moderato-Molto lento 6:47 Suite, Op. 34 for flute and piano 15:30 15 Allegretto poco mosso 5:48 1 Moderato 3:50 2 Scherzo-Allegro vivace 2:27 3 Romance-Andantino 4:14 Camille Saint-Saëns (1835 – 1921) 4 Final-Vivace 4:59 Romance, Op. 37 for flute and piano 16 5:22 Benjamin Godard (1849 – 1895) Suite, Op. 116 for flute and piano 9:47 Total playing time: 73:48 5 Allegretto 1:31 Recorded at the Curtis Hall, Philadelphia, USA 6 Idylle 4:00 7 Valse 4:16 Recording Producer and Engineer: Da-Hong Seetoo Translations: Carl Reinecke (1824 – 1910) German – Elke Hockings Sonata, Op. 167 for flute and piano “Undine” 17:38 French – Marie-Stella Pâris 8 Allegro 5:31 9 Intermezzo-Allegretto vivace 3:10 Design and Art Direction: Alan Trugman 10 Andante tranquillo 3:06 Cover Photograph: Jack Van Antwerp 11 Finale-Allegro molto agitato 5:51 This CD was recorded using 24-Bit, ed appassionato, quasi Presto Direct-to-Hard-Disc Technology. 2 3 Léon Dorchain based on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. This was put on at the Odéon in Paris during the September of that year and, according to the Hungarian-born pianist, The Romantic Flute teacher and one time pupil of Saint-Saëns, Isidor Philipp, Widor’s score placed him in Charles-Marie Jean Albert Widor was born in the French city of Lyons on 21 February ‘the top rank’. Philipp also claimed that it had been a long time since ‘a new work so 1844 into a family whose origins on his father’s side were Hungarian and, on his pure and charming’ had been heard. mother’s, thought to be Italian. Both Widor’s father and grandfather were organ builders so it is not surprising that Charles-Marie and his brother, Paul, soon started to learn Included in this incidental music was a Romance which was to be played off-stage to play the instrument. The most renowned organ builder at that time was Aristide with piano accompaniment. Later, Widor orchestrated this movement when creating Cavaillé-Coll and it was he who had exploited to the full the latest technology to create a concert suite from the play and, in 1898, used it again as the third movement of organs of a much higher standard than had hitherto been attained. In 1858 Cavaillé-Coll the Suite for flute and piano. He was composing this work for the renowned French visited Lyons and was so impressed by the playing of the fourteen-year-old Widor that flautist, Paul Taffanel (1844-1908) and it was he who gave it its first performance he suggested that he should go to Brussels to study with the great Belgian organist at a concert promoted by the Société de Musique de Chambre à Vent (Chamber Nicolas Lemmens whose own teacher could claim through his teacher’s teachers a Music Society for Wind Instruments) which he had founded in 1879. Louis Fleury, one direct line to Johann Sebastian Bach. of Taffanel’s illustrious pupils, writing in Cobbett’s Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music in 1926, claimed that Widor had in his suite, which he considered to have ‘all the His studies over, Widor took up the post of organist at a church in Lyons but, before characteristics of a sonata’, produced ‘the happiest effect from the contrasting timbres long, he had moved to Paris where, in 1869, he was appointed assistant to Camille of flute and piano’. Elsewhere in Cobbett Widor is described as ‘a learned musician of Saint-Saëns at La Madeleine which, like several other Parisian churches, boasted a fine accomplished technique’ who ‘may be placed in the same category as Saint-Saëns.’ Cavaillé-Coll organ. However, before the year was out, the post of organist at Saint- He was obviously also thought worthy enough to step into the shoes of another of the Sulpice became vacant and Widor was offered it. Surely he could not have imagined composers represented on this CD for he was appointed Professor of Organ at the then that he would preside over the Cavaillé-Coll organ in that building for the next Paris Conservatoire in succession to César Franck on the latter’s death in 1890. sixty-four years. Among Widor’s many compositions are eight organ symphonies but it is for the Toccata from the fifth of these that he is best known. Three years earlier, Benjamin Godard had also joined the staff of the Paris Conservatoire, as professor of the instrumental ensemble class, and in that same Widor by no means confined his compositional activities to the organ loft for he wrote year wrote some incidental music for a production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About concertos for piano, violin and cello, orchestral symphonies, choral works, songs, Nothing which opened at the Odéon on 8 December. In his youth, Godard himself had chamber music and music for the theatre. Strange as it might seem, it is into both of studied at the Paris Conservatoire, his main subjects being violin and composition. He these last two categories that Widor’s Suite for flute and piano Op.34 can be placed. In made two unsuccessful attempts at the prestigious Prix de Rome but, nonetheless, had 1885 Widor composed some incidental music for Le Conte d’avril, a play by Auguste- become a published composer by the age of twenty. He also became an accomplished 4 5 viola player and would take part enthusiastically in performances of chamber music. Over the years, many a composer has been inspired by the legend of Undine, the He was a great admirer of the works of Robert Schumann and, in 1876, orchestrated water-nymph or spirit of the waters. Having been born without a soul, Undine has to Kinderscenen (Scenes from Childhood), Schumann’s popular suite of pieces for the marry a mortal and bear him a child in order to achieve one but this is not without piano. its disadvantages. In the Slavonic telling of the tale, Undine becomes Rusalka whose love for a prince ends with his death and her return to her watery realm. The best- Godard’s original compositions include several operas, notably Jocelyn (which had its known opera to feature Rusalka is by Antonín Dvorákˇ but there is another by Alexander first performance in Brussels during February 1888 and which contains the Berceuse, Dargomyzhsky based on a poem on the subject by Alexander Pushkin. Composers Godard’s best-known piece), symphonies, concertos both for piano and violin, string who have written operas about Undine include E.T.A.Hoffmann (1816), Albert Lortzing quartets, piano trios, violin sonatas and various works for piano. In the New Grove (1845) and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1869). Tchaikovsky, however, destroyed most of Dictionary of Music and Musicians, John Trevitt suggests that, with his own expertise his version when it was rejected by the Imperial Theatres in St Petersburg, keeping just as a string player, Godard was most at ease composing music for stringed instruments a few sections of it for use in the ballet Swan Lake and his Second Symphony. Most of and puts the case for inclusion in the repertoire of two of his works for violin, the the Undine operas used as their starting point the version of the story published in 1811 Concerto romantique and the unaccompanied Sonata. Writing in an earlier edition of by Friedrich, baron de la Motte Fouqué (1777-1843) who had taken the idea from the Grove’s Dictionary, Godard’s near contemporary, Adolphe Jullien (1845-1932) ends writings of the Swiss-born physician, Paracelsus (1493-1541). In the twentieth century his otherwise positive article by damning his subject with a modicum of faint praise. Maurice Ravel expressed his interest in this fairy tale by including a movement entitled Godard, he claimed ‘had undoubted talent, and would have had much more success Ondine in Gaspard de la nuit, his suite for piano which dates from 1908 and, fifty years had he known how to impose a stricter discipline upon his natural gifts, and to judge his later, Frederick Ashton created a ballet on the subject for Margot Fonteyn and Michael own compositions more severely, without thinking that all the productions of his facile Somes to music by Hans Werner Henze. pen merited the attention of the musical world.’ It was in about 1885 that Carl Reinecke composed the Sonata for flute and piano, Godard died in Cannes on 10 January 1895 and exactly seven months later, on Op.167, to which he was to attach the subtitle, Undine. Perhaps it was the liquid quality Saturday 10 August, two movements from his Suite for Flute and Piano, Op.116, of the flute that persuaded him to use it to represent a water sprite. Louis Fleury, in his were performed at Henry Wood’s very first Promenade Concert at London’s Queen’s article ‘The Flute in Modern Chamber Music’ written for Cobbett’s Cyclopedia, speaks Hall. It was Alfred Fransella, the Dutch-born principal flautist of the Queen’s Hall highly of this Sonata and congratulates Reinecke for being one of the few modern Orchestra, known to his colleagues as the ‘Paganini of the Flute’, who played the Idyll writers (this essay dates from 1926) who have cared to attempt a work in full sonata and the Valse in the first half of the concert which also included Wagner’s overture, form for the flute.

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