“Masterworks for Flute and Piano II” = POULENC: Sonata for Flute and Piano; FRANK MARTIN: Ballade; CARL REINEKE: Sonata “Undine” for Flute and Piano; MARTINŮ: Sonata for Flute and Piano; MESSIAEN: Le merle noir – Sharon Bezaly, flute / Ronald Brautigam, piano – BIS multichannel SACD, SACD-1729 [Distr. by Qualiton], 59:23 *****:
This recording conveniently offers standards of the twentieth-century flute repertoire in performances that may themselves prove to be standards, they’re that commanding. Sharon Bezaly has been amassing a catalog of recordings for BIS that have received just about universal critical praise. The reason is clear: no technical challenge seems to daunt her, and yet she is constantly a marvel of musical sensitivity. If Bezaly were a violin virtuoso, you’d say her playing combines the most salient features of Heifetz and Grumiaux. Comparisons with other flutists come to mind, but she really is in a class by herself.
There’s no better piece to turn than the Martin Ballade to get an idea of the kind of playing Bezaly is capable of. Written as a competition piece, the Ballade includes just about every technical flourish in the flutist’s bag of tricks, all in nonstop succession. At the same time, it is an example of a genre dear to Romantic composers, a free-ranging fantasy that follows some unspecified program and does so in dramatic fashion. Thus it is anything but the typical dry-as-dust competition piece. The ideal performance, therefore, needs to combine the highest degree of technical polish with great musicality. For me, this is pretty much an ideal performance.
And though the program concentrates mostly on the mid-twentieth century (Reinecke’s 1882 Undine Sonata is odd man out), the compositions seem chosen to show the variety of musical expression available to modern composers. Poulenc’s elegantly cheery free-form sonata, with its debts to earlier composers such as Saint-Saens and Fauré, creates an entirely different sound world from Martin’s Ballade, with its references to twelve-tone technique, or Messiaen’s Le merle noir, which combines a stark modernist musical language with the language of birds, in this case the blackbird. Different from all three is the energetic neoclassicism of Martinů’s Sonata, written in America at the end of World War II.
Reinecke’s gentle Undine Sonata adds even greater variety to the mix. Composed in strict sonata form, it nonetheless indulges in subtle tone painting to recreate the watery milieu of its namesake, the mermaid Undine, who marries a mortal and comes to grief thereby.
A wonderfully varied program wonderfully played by both Bezaly and her accompanist Ronald Brautigam, all captured in sound that’s a model of clarity and realism (which includes registering every intake of breath the flutist makes, for those who care about such matters). This deserves the highest recommendation.
-Lee Passarella
