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RECITAL 1994--PROGRAM NOTES
Henri Dutilleux: Sonatine
Virgil Thomson: Sonata for Flute Alone
Kent Kennan: Night Soliloquy
Walter Gieseking: Sonatine
- Intermission -
John Heiss: Fantasia Appassionata for Flute Solo
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Concerto in G major
When I was a youngster just starting out on the flute, I received as a gift William Kincaid's now classic Columbia recital record. The program ranged from Marcello to Hindemith and Dutilleux, which I thought was all very nice, but I was disappointed that he didn't play anything difficult. When, as a student at the Eastman School, I re-encountered the Dutilleux Sonatine, I found it to be far more challenging than Kincaid, the legendary principal flute of the Philadelphia Orchestra, had made it sound--the Apollonian ease and finesse of his recorded performance sets an impossible standard, which perhaps explains why I haven't gotten around to performing the Sonatine until today. Dutilleux has been commissioned by the BSO to write a new work to be performed next February; the Sonatine--the set piece for the Paris Conservatoire in 1943--is among his first published pieces.
When Virgil Thomson was a guest of Harvard University on the occasion of his 90th birthday, I had the honor of performing his Flute Concerto and Sonata for Flute Alone. Before the concerts I met with him to play the music and hear any suggestions he might have. In each of the first two movements of the Sonata, strongly contrasted material is presented. I thought a discreet adjustment of the tempo enhanced these contrasts, and played accordingly. Whereupon he wagged a forefinger at me and gave me a friendly but firm lecture on the virtues of steady tempo, and the resulting clarity of form and proportion. Thomson's music, like the man himself, is direct and plain-spoken, and not in need of further improvement.
Kent Kennan wrote Night Soliloquy for flute, strings and piano the year he received his master's degree from the Eastman School of Music, where he was a student of the arch-romantic Howard Hanson. The piece enjoyed an immediate success. Kennan arranged the accompaniment for piano and for wind ensemble, and the three versions were recorded by such flutists as James Pellerite, William Kincaid (twice), and my sainted teacher Joseph Mariano, then at the beginning of his long tenure at the Eastman School. This must have been heady stuff for the young composer, and indeed the Soliloquy remains by far Kennan's best-known work.
The German Pianist Walter Gieseking is widely remembered as an unsurpassed interpreter of the music of Debussy and Ravel. Virtually unknown is the fact that he was also the composer of a small but polished body of chamber music. The Sonatina, a more ambitious work than the title might imply, looks back past Stravinsky and Schoenberg to the nineteenth century and is distinguished, not surprisingly, by a particularly ambitious and idiomatic piano part. Also unsurprisingly, given Gieseking's Francophile sympathies, is the fact that the first movement seems to have been composed under the spell of Gabriel Fauré, who after all was a contemporary composer for the first 29 years of Gieseking's life.
John Heiss' Fantasia Appassionata is the fourth in a series of brief works for solo instruments also entitled Episodes. Implicit in this designation is his idea of a "slice of life," freely improvisational, ending not with finality but with a last thought (or question?) left hanging in the air. From the first note onward, Heiss' fantasy draws us from one mood to the next with mercurial subtlety and sly wit. Perhaps because he has been equally prominent as composer and flutist, Heiss has fortified this particular slice of (his?) life with an extended quote from his own Chamber Concerto for flute and ten instruments, and seasoned it with a paraphrase of a flute solo from Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms. The Fantasia Appassionata was composed for the National Flute Association's 1994 High School Soloist Competition.
If Virgil Thomson demanded steady tempo in the performance of his music, C.P.E. Bach demanded the opposite, particularly in slow movements. He had this to say on the subject: "The components of performance are the loudness and softness of tones . . . legato and staccato execution . . . the ritard and accelerando. The lack of these elements or inept use of them makes a poor performance." [Emphasis mine.] Bach intended such freedom of tempo to heighten the expressive impact of his already passionate, dramatic, and unpredictable style. The first movement of our concerto, for instance, is marked by abrupt modulations and sudden changes of mood, while the Largo has a heart-on-sleeve emotionality that we associate with a much later era. The finale proceeds with more or less uniterrupted high spirits--although the soloist does take to inserting an irrelevant twiddle at odd moments, such as right after the end of a solo.
--Fenwick Smith
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