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Music open thread: Flute concertos [1]
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Date: 2025-01-07
I’m gonna be posting these on Mondays, usually, sometimes Tuesdays if there’s some observance, but I won’t schedule them. So if it’s Wednesday and I haven’t posted one of these and I haven’t gotten to the double bass…
The main purpose here is to find undeservedly obscure music ignored for reasons other than musical merit, such as the composer being a woman, or black.
For each instrument of the orchestra, and some other instruments, I find music, such as concertos, in which that instrument has an important solo part. Of course when I get to the violin and the piano, it might all be music by the usual suspects, e.g., Brahms, Tchaikovsky.
I’m starting this survey with the flute, which often gets the top staff in an orchestral score. And the very first piece that comes to mind is Chaminade’s Flute Concertino in D major.
Cécile Chaminade was a pianist and composer. She wrote a whole bunch of short and sweet piano pieces, which she played in concerts that made her a little money and published the sheet music for a lot of money. No one expected large scale pieces from her such as string quartets or symphonies.
Or piano concertos for that matter, though the Konzertstück might qualify in form if not in title. But the Paris Conservatoire commissioned her to write a flute concerto, so she wrote the Flute Concertino in D major, Opus 107.
Clara Schumann also wrote little solo piano pieces, but gave them less imaginative titles. And she wrote a Piano Concerto in A minor which was published as her Opus 7. The odd thing about that piano concerto is that I have to find a performance by a male soloist.
But with Chaminade’s Flute Concertino, there are men of varying fame who’ve played the solo, like James Galway and Matthew Wu, the latter in a flute and wind band arrangement.
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In the cases when the survey is only bringing up music by male composers, I will then at least showcase women musicians on the solo parts. With the flute, though, this is not much of a problem, as there seems to be a strong association, at least in America, that it is an instrument for women to play, not men.
In my old high school’s band, as I recall, the girls played flute or clarinet, the boys played trumpet or drums (it was not a fully staffed band in the end). The writers of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, in writing the titular character for Will Ferrell, have him playing flute while figure skating as a demonstration of his macho hubris, perhaps as a play on this juvenile association of the flute with women. Or it could also be the idea that playing the flute is delicate and Ron Burgundy is a rather coarse character.
Painting by Judith Leyster of a boy playing flute in front of a wall with a violin hanging from it. Leyster was highly regarded in her lifetime, but forgotten after her death, and her works were attributed to her husband, or to other Dutch painters.
It’s different at university, of course. The men who play flute in college play it because that’s the instrument they want to play professionally, and they take it as seriously as a young man who wants to play football or some other sport in a major league.
Well, there were also the music education majors who were required to take the basic woodwinds class. I wasn’t a music education major, but I took the basic woodwinds class because I wanted to try the oboe. Before I could take on the oboe, the instructor had me start out on alto saxophone, followed by clarinet and bassoon.
The instructor said if I had been a music education major I would have been required to take on the flute. I didn’t want to play the flute, not because of any silly ideas of it being a girly instrument, but because it looks uncomfortable to me, how it’s played to the side (the technical term is “transverse”).
I didn’t know you can buy a head joint so that you can play the flute like an oboe or clarinet, though I doubt the university would have provided it to me just for a couple of months in a basic class. Especially seeing that a special head joint tends to be more expensive than a complete instrument meant for student use.
The Swan Neck Headjoint is a flute headjoint that has a bend of approximately 40 degrees. It is handmade from sterling silver, with a handcut embouchure. This headjoint turns the strenuous position for playing the flute into a relaxed one. With the Swan Neck Headjoint, you will feel much less stress on your right shoulder, your neck and your left shoulder. Flutelab Swan Neck headjoint comes with a case, thumb rest, and instructions for use.
Notice how they write “less stress on your right shoulder, your neck” and then “and your left shoulder.” So the standard flute head joint is for a playing position that is strenuous on both shoulders? No thanks. I’ll take the headaches of the oboe instead.
The flute is certainly not considered a girly instrument in Germany or Austria. Until 1997, the Vienna Philharmonic didn’t have any women playing flute, or any women playing in the orchestra at all. Now, their principal first violinist (“concertmaster,” or “leader” in European parlance) is a woman, Albena Danailova, she’s “die Leiterin des Orchesters.”
But as of today, the orchestra’s roster lists only one woman flutist, Karin Bonelli, out of six players. Your browser might need a second to scroll down past all the string players and the two harpists, both of whom are women. Danailova might say this is because the two best harpists who auditioned for the orchestra happened to women, but there was only one woman among the six best flutists auditioning.
Of course playing flute in an orchestra is different from playing flute as a soloist in a sonata or a concerto. Generally orchestral flutes blend in with the rest of the woodwinds, or the whole orchestra, or provide punctuating flourishes for phrases (e.g., a lot of John Williams scores), rather than being out in front of the strings, next to the conductor.
Here’s Clara Andrada de la Calle as the soloist in Jacques Ibert’s Flute Concerto.
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Women are often judged on what they wear, and there’s an unfair expectation of prominent women that they must never wear the same outfit twice. James Galway could wear the same thing at every one of his concerts and no one would criticize him for it. He doesn’t, but he could. White shirt, white bowtie, black jacket, black pants, black shoes.
But if Clara Andrada de la Calle wore the same dress at the concert she played Ibert’s Flute Concerto that she wore at the concert in which she played Nielsen’s Flute Concerto, she would get a lot of flak. Unless… did she play both of those in the same concert? That’s an achievement.
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Michael Haydn wrote less than half as many symphonies as his older brother Joseph. Even as a percentage, we would see that Michael used flutes in his symphonies a lot less than Joseph. But both of them wrote flute concertos. Here’s Michael’s.
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There’s a much better performance of this on YouTube, but it’s one of those videos in which the video track is some irrelevant painting for the whole duration, and you doubt whether the audio track is properly licensed.
I thought about saving this next one for next week.
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I was looking for Franz Danzi’s Symphony in D minor. Couldn’t find it on YouTube. But YouTube did give me this video:
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Piccolo concertos
I should not neglect la petite flûte, or il flauto piccolo. The small flute has pretty much the same fingering as the regular flute, but I surmise you need to have your fingers closer together.
Antonio Vivaldi is known almost entirely for his Four Seasons, a violin concerto for each season of the year. And he wrote a lot of other violin concerti, as well as concertos for other instruments. Like quite a few for piccolo, apparently.
Such as this one in C major, RV 443. Irais Martinez with the Simón Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela conducted by Joshua Dos Santos
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Or this one in A minor, RV 445.
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That’s only the first movement. I will link the Larghetto and closing Allegro rather than embed them, in the interest of saving some bandwidth for the videos the commenters want to embed.
Recorder concertos
We feel fairly confident as to what instrument Antonio Vivaldi meant when he wrote “violino" or “viola” or “cembalo” or “organo” in his scores. But when he called for “flauto,” musicians, musicologists and recording studios continue to argue as to which instrument he meant.
Maybe he actually meant recorder, or “flauto dolce”? The playing position for the recorder is very similar to the playing position for the oboe or the clarinet: you have both of your hands in front of your chest and stomach, instead of off to the side. Even today you can buy a decent recorder made of wood for a price that is not much more than the price of a tin whistle.
Vivaldi’s music for strings is often played on instruments that existed when he was alive, or were made during his lifetime, such as by Antonio Stradivari. But to use a flute or a recorder made during Vivaldi’s lifetime might be a bad idea, if it can be done at all. Reproductions of period instruments might work…
With Telemann’s Concerto in E minor for two flutes and orchestra, we don’t doubt which instruments he meant. The “flauto traverso” is clearly an instrument like our modern concert flute, though made of wood rather than metal, and the “flauto dolce” is the recorder.
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The open thread question: what’s your favorite music with flute, piccolo or recorder solo?
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