When you play the first disk in this boxed set, you hear Vivaldi’s Concerto in C major for flautino. And you are stunned. How could you not be? The sound of this flautino (actually a sopranino, the highest ranged recorder), slices through the air like a warbling songbird—a very small songbird. Its tone has an odd and captivating range, one you know you will not soon forget. And of course the piece opens on an Allegro movement, so it overwhelms you instantly like an injection. It is like hearing Cecilia Bartoli sing Vivaldi (notably, his Anch’il mar par che sommerga from Bajaset). You sit back and marvel at the sheer skill of Petri, who can flawlessly produce crystalline demi-semiquavers without even blinking. You get a feel for how Paganini must have wowed his crowds in 1828 Vienna. Music as chocolate, 78% dark.
But is it filling? Can you subsist on it? Tough questions. Piece after piece parades by and the 18th century composers slowly meld into one another. Even the one “maverick” that Michala Petri includes, Gordon Jacob (1895-1984), composed mostly Baroque-style pieces (700 of them) while his contemporaries were traipsing through atonality and serialism (or even just neo-romanticism). So there are no pieces here by Paul Hindemith, Luciano Berio, John Tavener, Michael Tippett, Benjamin Britten, Leonard Bernstein, or Edmund Rubbra, all of whom have written thematically challenging works for the recorder. If you want some of that, seek out the recordings of Frans Brüggen or better still, David Munrow. But if you want music played by a virtuoso skilled at picking safe bets and crowd pleasers, look no further. Petri will sooth and dazzles you with her motion-blur fingertips as they travel the worn wood of sopraninos, sopranos, altos, and tenors.
– Peter Bates
