That great artist Georges
Barrère (1876-1944) was hugely
influential on both sides of the Atlantic.
He was an august member of the Parisian
school and then a powerful presence
in America after his emigration there
in 1905. This Crystal programme therefore
pays handsome tribute in French works,
all of which were dedicated to him.
Caplet was only nineteen
when he wrote the Feuillets d’album.
Three pieces are presented here,
numbers two, four and five. The second
is charmingly lyric and unpretentious
whilst the fourth, an Invocation,
has a certain tristesse embedded in
the heart of its happiness. The Petite
valse has plenty of requisite joie
de vivre.
Henry Woollett is a
minor composer, French and of English
ancestry. He studied with Pugno (piano)
and Massenet (composition) and in turn
taught Caplet and Honegger. His sonata
dates from 1903 and has something of
the ease of Fauré’s First Violin
Sonata. It’s certainly no shrinking
violet of a flute sonata – it’s a good
twenty-five minutes long – and allows
some powerful, almost Brahmsian moments
for the pianist; naturally enough the
composer was a fine exponent himself.
There’s a first movement fugal passage
and a languid Andante. The finale is
rather long winded but once again shows
its dual compositional allegiances.
To bathe the middle
of the programme in sympathetic warmth
we have Albert Seitz’s melodic charm
in his 1901 Chant dans la nuit.
Eugène Lacroix used to be played
quite a bit by salon bands. His Quatre
Pièces date from the same
year as the Seitz and mine variously
antique airs, tricksy scalar writing
for the flute, and opportunities for
floated tone. Lefort’s solitary contribution
is the kind of Bourrée
that violinists of the time were churning
out by the dozen. Gaubert, a rival of
Barrère, spins a delicious Romance
generously dedicated to the older
man. Finally there is Demare’s Les
Marionettes. It was originally written
for piccolo and orchestra but is heard
in a piccolo and piano reduction made
by the pianist on this disc, Martin
Amlin. There is no evidence apparently
that the flautist ever played it though
it was certainly dedicated to him. It’s
full of lighthearted frivolity.
So the recital ends
on an airy high. The performances of
the Buyse-Amlin duo are highly purposeful
and poetic and strongly evocative of
the Parisian milieu in which these kinds
of works flourished. They’ve been very
sympathetically recorded as well.
Jonathan Woolf
Leone Buyse (flute) 
