The combination
of flute and strings or harp can easily take on a very French
feel; there is something about the timbres that easily conjures
up ghostly echoes of Ravel. The composers on this disc of chamber
music for flute either embrace this francophilia or do their
best to avoid it. The music is performed by the New Zealand
flautist Tessa Brinckman with her group, the East West Continuo.
In the first piece,
Through a gentle rain, composer Jack Gabel deliberately
evokes Japanese music by using a traditional Japanese instrument,
a koto, to accompany the flute. The result, to my ears, sounds
evocatively Japanese but I imagine that to Japanese ears the
results are more a mixture of Japanese and Western sounds.
French harpist Bernard
Andrès embraces his heritage wholeheartedly and in Narthex
for flute and harp, produces a piece which from its very opening
hints at Ravel and Debussy. The inspiration is a series of Old
Testament sculptures from Romanesque churches in Burgundy. I
found the work gently evocative rather than vividly characterised.
Andrès spices things up with a number of interesting special
effects, getting the harpist to rap the sounding-board, rattle
the tuning key in the sound hole and getting the flautist to
slide a finger inside the flute head joint, resulting in curiously
eerie glissandos.
Mark Fish’s Pictures
of Miro uses a series of pictures by the Catalan artist
as the inspiration for eleven short movements for flute and
string trio. Fish’s orchestration is wonderfully transparent
and his melodic outlines often very French. But he also includes
more hard-edged material as he responds to some of Miro’s more
dramatic canvases. All the movements are quite short, mixing
whimsy and lyricism with intensity and humour.
The Flute Quartet
by Swiss composer Volkmar Andreae is another work which wears
its Gallic charm on its sleeve. Andreae was director of the
Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra and this quartet was first performed
in 1942 by flautist Andre Jaunet. The work is both charming
and evocative.
Tessa Brinckman’s
own work Glass Sky gives the disc its name and is another
piece where the composer uses a new sound-world, thus exorcising
the old one. It was inspired by a visit to Helen Martins’s Owl
House Museum in the desert plains of Karoo, South Africa. Brinckman
was born in South Africa and the work evokes her memories of
this place. Spare of texture, it is built from a series of bird
calls. Brinckman mixes and matches these calls to create a climax
in a work which mixes eastern and western ideas.
D’Arcy Reynolds’s
Cloven Dreams was commissioned as a companion piece to
Glass Sky. Reynolds uses the interior of the Owl House
as her inspiration. Her melodic material is attractively folksy,
again a new sound-world exorcising the old. The aura here is
more Copland than Ravel. Reynolds combines her melodies with
some distinctively rhythmic material and as the piece progresses,
produces attractive polyrhythmical accompaniments; all in all
a fitting conclusion to an imaginative recital.
Brinckman and her
colleagues give pleasure in all of the pieces here. Not everything
played is a masterpiece, but all the pieces are interesting
and imaginative.
Robert Hugill
Tessa Brinckman (flute)
