Flute Concertos: Nielsen – Griffes – Martin – Ibert

Jensen’s tone has a fine colour, is nicely centred, with beautiful intonation and a low register for which many a player would sacrifice their entire collection of pre-war Rudall Carte cleaning rods.
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Carl Nielsen
Flute Concerto
1. Allegro moderato
2. Allegretto, un poco

Charles T. Griffes
POEM for Flute and Orchestra

Frank Martin
BALLADE pour Flûte, Orchestre à cordes et Piano

Jacques Ibert
Concerto pour Flûte et Orchestre
1. Allegro
2. Andante
3. Allegro scherzando

Thomas Jensen – Flute
South Jutland Symphony Orchestra
Giordano Bellincampi – Conductor

Flute Concertos ©

“The flute cannot belie its nature, it belongs in Arcadia and prefers the pastoral moods.”

This is how Carl Nielsen described the flute in 1930 in connection with a performance of his flute concerto. Nevertheless, in the course of his concerto Carl Nielsen exposes the flute to a number of emotional shocks that do not exactly accord with the notions that the ancient Greeks associated with the peaceful meadows of Arcadia. And in point of fact Carl Nielsen, like Charles Griffes, Jacques Ibert and Frank Martin among others, is one of the composers who, in the first half of the twentieth century, determined to take the flute seriously as a solo instrument able to express a broad palette of human states of mind.
Compared for example with the clarinet, cello and violin, the flute was above all a minor instrumental character when the leading composers of the Romantic epoch in the nineteenth century were to write chamber music, or concertos for a solo instrument and orchestra. But when Debussy, with the tone-poem Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, struck out in a new musical direction at the beginning of the 1890s, it was the flute that took the lead among the instruments of the symphony orchestra. With its beguiling, delicate notes, the flute now played a major role in the unfolding of an emancipated, modern music rich in tonal colours and erotic daydreams, and it was made clear that the flute, despite its gentle nature, also concealed seductively dangerous sides.
In the American Charles Griffes’ Poem for Flute and Orchestra this same French-influenced sensuality plays an important role. True, Griffes received some of his most important musical impulses during studies in Berlin in 1903-1907, but when Griffes composed his Poem in 1918 in New York, he did so under the inspiration of the French flautist George Barrère. As a very young musician Barrère played the solo flute in the first performance of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune in Paris in 1894, and after he moved to New York in 1905, and among other things worked as solo flautist in the New York Philharmonic, he set new standards in the American flute milieu with a playing style coloured by French elegance and tonal delicacy.
Musically, Charles Griffes was a cosmopolitan, and by nature a passionate dreamer. Like Debussy he was attracted by the refined aesthetic of Chinese and Japanese art; and Griffes made use of socalled synthetic scales, which give the musical expression a distinctive wavering character and an element of mystery. All this plays its part in Poem for Flute and Orchestra, which also demonstrates Griffes’ fine feeling for instrumentation. This comes to expression among other ways in atmospheric dialogues between solo flute, cellos and solo viola, and by way of a highly effective use of harp, gong and the two horns of the orchestra. In particular, the use of the horn’s snarling stopped notes gives the wordless music a dramatic feel and a sense of underlying melancholy, despite a sometimes sparkling virtuosic surface.
“… now and then something has occurred to me that would ‘sit’ well with the flute”. So wrote Carl Nielsen in a letter of 22nd July 1926. Shortly afterwards he was fully preoccupied with the work on Concerto for Flute and Orchestra, and he hoped that the concerto would be ready for its first performance in Paris, where a grand presentation concert with a number of orchestral works by Carl Nielsen was planned for October the same year. Most of the concerto was composed during travels in Germany and Italy, when Carl Nielsen stayed in Tuscany for the whole of September, and the concerto was only just finished on time. The last corrections to the solo part, which was to be played by the Danish flautist Holger Gilbert-Jespersen, were made in the train from Copenhagen to Paris. Despite the relatively turbulent circumstances in which the concerto was composed, it is one of the most important flute concertos of the twentieth century, and a central work among Carl Nielsen’s late compositions. The sections of the concerto often pile up steeply against one another like rough-hewn rocks in a Cubist painting, and by virtue of an expressive use of among other instruments trombone, clarinet and timpani interacting with the solo flute, the concerto in its own way offers a fine concentrate of the dramatic qualities that are mainly to be found in Carl Nielsen’s symphonies. The drama intensifies especially in the dialogue with the trombone, where the flute is allowed to play the role of nervous hysteric; but this is only temporary, for in Carl Nielsen’s words, the flute belongs in a “more temperate zone” and “the orchestral accompaniment is very finely chiselled, almost like chamber music.” Most striking is the high degree of the fantastical that typifies the concerto. Despite a sometimes almost improvisatory character, Carl Nielsen lets the flute come into its own as an instrument that spans a wide expressive register from the capriciously carefree to the passionate and intimately singable.
With the Parisian Jacques Ibert’s Concerto for Flute and Orchestra (1934) we are at the heart of the French flute tradition, where pace, tempo and suppleness of tone are indispensable qualities. In this case they are combined with a high degree of musical charm that speaks directly to the great majority of listeners – including the composer of the work. It is said that Ibert had a smile on his lips when, in a hotel in Marseilles, he heard a radio broadcast of the first performance of the concerto from Paris in February 1934. The concerto was given its first performanceby Marcel Moyse, one of the most important representatives of the French flute school of the twentieth century, and after a short while the technically challenging third movement, Allegro Scherzando, was selected as an exam set piece at the Paris Conservatoire. Besides making great demands on the soloist’s virtuosity, Ibert’s Flute Concerto is first and foremost a living expression of French esprit communicated by the mercurial temperament of the flute. Like a sweeping whirlwind the solo instrument makes its entry, and with a marvellous touch of humour Ibert demands that the strings follow suit at the extremely strenuous tempo. In the second movement, Andante, Ibert ventures into a dream world rich in euphony and film-like moods, but without any sentimental slant. And in the last movement the soloist is given the opportunity to express himself with as much bravura as one could wish in an occasionally jazzy interaction with the orchestra. And the effect is all the greater when Ibert opens up a misty dream world along the way where the strings, in restrained pizzicato steps, accompany a sleepwalker-like melody in the solo flute.
The Swiss Frank Martin’s Ballade for Flute, String Orchestra and Piano (1941) was originally composed in 1939 in a version for flute and piano for a music competition in Martin’s home city of Geneva. And with an expressive use of the flute in all three of its registers, the music also thoroughly demonstrates the flautist’s instrumental skills. Frank Martin’s Ballade for Flute, String Orchestra and Piano is however first and foremost a unique example of how the flute can play a central role in conveying sombre moods in a drama typified by an inciting eeriness. Even with the title Ballade Martin signals that there may be danger ahead. ‘Ballade’ is among other things a designation for a major dramatic song based on legends, as is the case for example with Schubert’s and Goethe’s Erlkönig, where a father rides with his son into the embrace of the elf-king and death. However, Frank Martin has not associated any actual text with his flute ballad; he does ask that the flautist, besides dolce (gentle), also plays molto uguale (very uniformly) at the beginning of the piece. Although the introduction is muted, this is music of great rigour. The flute part is kept in an iron grip by the piano’s scrupulously repeated notes and by the string orchestra, which slowly but relentlessly spreads a web of tension-filled voices. The claustrophobic mood soon results in a more and more agitated atmosphere where the flute so to speak breaks out in shrill ‘screams’ in the highest register. Later the music falls calm, but is subsequently whipped up again into a new rhythmic gallop. And although towards the end the flautist musters all his heroic spirit in a long succession of wild cascades of notes, in the end piano and strings have the last word in music which – composed in the middle of Europe on the edge of World War II – tells its own grim story of a desperate existential struggle.

Esben Tange

RELEASE DATE: SEPTEMBER 2012

CATALOGUE NUMBER: DACOCD 725

EAN: 5709499725009