Pan + Apoll: Water Music for Flute and Harp
Jean Emile Paul CRAS (1879-1932)
Suite en Duo, for flute and harp (1924) [15:25]
Marc BERTHOMIEU (1906-91)
Trois Thèmes, for flute and harp [6:30]
Eugène BOZZA (1905-1991)
Trois Impressions, for flute and harp (1953) [8:25]
Albert ZABEL (1834-1910)
La Source – Am Springbrunnen Op.23, for solo harp (1897) [6:18]
Bernard ANDRÈS (b.1941)
Algues. Sept Pièces, for flute and harp (1988) [12:04]
Claude DEBUSSY (1862-1918)
Syrinx, L.129 (1913) [2:47]
Toru TAKEMITSU (1930-1996)
Towards the Sea (III), for alto flute and harp (1989) [10:30]
William ALWYN (1905-1985)
Naiades, fantasy sonata for flute and harp (1973) [12:44]
Alja Velkaverh (flute)
Antonia Schreiber (harp)
rec. April 2020, Köln, Germany
HÄNSSLER HC20041 [75:23]
Given the inevitably narrow range of instrumental colours and dynamics, this is not a CD best listened to in one sitting. It is, however, a useful and enjoyable anthology of what is, for the most part good and interesting music – most of it not overfamiliar or over-recorded. Ms. Schreiber and Ms. Velkaverh are clearly very accomplished musicians, and their performances are recorded in a suitable and attractive acoustic. It helps, too, that unlike many such recorded anthologies this one has a clear rationale to the choice of repertoire. The disc’s main title, Pan and Apoll(o), serves for little more than to prompt us to think of Pan’s syrinx and Apollo’s lyre; of, that is, a wind instrument and a string instrument. The disc’s subtitle (‘Water music for flute and harp’) is more significant; the pieces by Zabel, Andrès, Takemitsu and Alwyn all carry titles which explicitly name ‘watery’ subjects, from Zabel’s fountain to Andrès’ seaweed, Takemitsu’s sea-pieces to Alwyn’s nymphs of brooks and fountains. The works which don’t have water-specific titles either have movements which do have such titles – such as Eugene Bozza’s Trois Impressions, of which the first movement is called ‘La Fontaine de la Villa Médicis’, or Marc Berthomieu’s Trois Thèmes, the second of which has the title ‘Moldave’ – or have sections which most listeners would choose to describe with epithets such as ‘flowing’ or ‘bubbling’.
There are two solo pieces on the disc: Zabel’s La Source for Antonia Schreiber’s harp and Debussy’s Syrinx for Alja Velkaverh’s flute. Without muddying the work in any way, Velkaverh’s reading of Syrinx articulates both the superficial simplicity of Debussy’s composition and the depth and range of the feelings and ideas it evokes, being both evocative and lucid. The ambiguity of the work’s harmonic scheme and its apparent rhythmic freedom give it a quasi-improvisatory quality (it is essentially built around a fairly simple motif which is repeated, and developed in several different ways). Velkaverh certainly captures the haunting beauty thus created. The piece was originally written as incidental music, to be played off-stage in Psyché, a play by Debussy’s friend Gabriel Mourey. Mourey said of the piece that it was “a real jewel of restrained emotion, of sadness, of plastic beauty, of discrete tenderness and poetry”. Debussy’s original title for the piece was La flûte de Pan. It was only named Syrinx (perhaps by the publisher Jean Jobert) when it was published posthumously. This second title invites the listener to think of Syrinx, an Arcadian nymph pursued by the lustful Pan who, to escape him, begged the river nymphs to assist her and was transformed into a group of water reeds, whose hollow stems made a musical sound when the disappointed god plucked them and blew through them (the story is told in Book I of Ovid’s Metamorphoses). The range of colours Debussy’s writing discovers in the solo flute (compare and contrast – as examiners delight in saying – the sound of the flute at the opening and close of this brief work) is part of its magic. Alja Velkaverh certainly conjures up the piece’s air of enchantment, both supernatural and erotic, without ignoring its intimations of death and transformation. I haven’t, of course, heard every single recording of this much-played piece, but I can’t offhand recall a better interpretation and find it hard to believe that there can be many more beautiful versions than this one.
Harpist Antonia Schreiber is working with what, to all but the most committed of harp specialists, will seem to be inferior material in her solo piece La Source – Am Springbrunnen by Albert Heinrich Zabel. Born in Berlin, Zabel toured Europe extensively as a virtuoso harpist before settling in St. Petersburg in 1855 (where he eventually died). In St. Petersburg he taught the harp at the Conservatoire and was harpist at the Imperial Ballet. He was the first interpreter of Tchaikovsky’s famous harp cadenzas in The Nutcracker, Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty. Zabel became fascinated by several aspects of Russian culture, writing a novel about Catherine the Great and a biography of Anton Rubinstein, as well as essays on Tolstoy and Turgenev. His composition La Source – the subtitle translates as ‘At the Fountain’ – is an attractive, but ultimately rather lightweight, contribution to the tradition of music about fountains, of which more famous examples include Liszt’s Les jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este (composed in 1877, 20 years before this piece by Zabel) and Respighi’s Fontane di Roma. This disc contains another example of this minor genre in Eugène Bozza’s ‘La Fontaine de la Villa Médicis’.
Such is the artistry of Antonia Schreiber and Alja Velkaverh that every one of the duos on this disc gives real pleasure; it was a particular delight to be reintroduced to William Alwyn’s beautiful Naiades – with its evocative images of water nymphs, a work I hadn’t heard for some years. Both artists, as well as being active as soloists, are principals in the Gürzenich Orchestra of Cologne. They are audibly very used to making music together. For me three of the duo pieces constituted particular highlights which tempted me to repeated listenings – Takemitsu’s Toward the Sea, Bozza’s Trois impressions and Andrès’ Algues. Of these three works, that by Takemitsu was the only one with which I was already quite familiar. Toward the Sea was originally written in 1981 (in support of Greenpeace’s ‘Save the Whales’ campaign) as a piece for flute and guitar; a version for alto flute, harp and string orchestra was prepared in the same year. The version played on this disc, for alto flute and harp, was made in 1989. I haven’t been able to consult scores, but so far as I can hear, the flute part is unchanged throughout the three versions. (All three versions can be heard on a DG disc, I Hear the Water Dreaming, 20/21 453 459-2). Much of Takemitsu’s music has been characterized by his fascination with the movements and sounds of water. That fascination can be traced back at least as far as the electronic composition Water Music of 1960, in which all the material derives from the sounds produced by droplets of water. This fascination seems to have reached its peak in the 1970s and 80s, with works such as Garden Rain (1974), Rain Tree (1982), Rain Coming (1982), riverrun (1987), I Hear the Water Dreaming (1987) and the three versions of Toward the Sea. Toward the Sea is in three short movements – ‘The Night’, ‘Moby Dick’ and ‘Cape Cod’. As the title of the second movement makes clear, a major inspiration in this music was Takemitsu’s familiarity with Herman Melville’s great novel. The composer has, indeed, cited a statement from the first chapter (‘Loomings’) of Moby Dick in connection with Toward the Sea: “as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded forever”. Takemitsu’s concern in this work goes beyond the evocation of the sea’s sound and movement (though some of the writing for the harp does evoke such things). Here the sea is a place, or perhaps an agent, of metaphysical possibility and wisdom. We might add to Takemitsu’s quotation a longer passage from the same chapter of Moby Dick: “Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.” Toward the Sea, when performed as well as it is here, is a work of both aural beauty and considerable profundity; it is, like a lot of Takemitsu, well-made while retaining an aura of freedom.
Eugène Bozza’s Trois impressions are much less adventurous than Takemitsu’s work, but have a distinctive French elegance, not least in the first of the three pieces, ‘La Fontaine de la Villa Médicis’. Bozza, the son of a French mother and an Italian father, won the Prix de Rome in 1934 and lived at the Villa Medici in Rome for four subsequent years. Though ‘La Fontaine de la Villa Médicis’ was not written (initially as a work for flute and piano) until 1953, the germ of the work must surely go back to the years when he was living in Rome. The garden fountains at the Villa Medici are, after all, amongst those celebrated in Respighi’s Fontane di Roma (in its final section). In Bozza’s evocation the harp seems largely to ‘represent’ the sound and movement of the waters in the fountain and the flute to suggest the songs of the birds in the garden. The second of these ‘impressions’, ‘La petite Nymphe de Diane’, which is actually for solo flute, may allude to statuary in the gardens of the Villa Medici or the adjacent Borghese Gardens – or perhaps it is to be regarded simply as a quasi-impressionist evocation of classical mythology in the manner of Debussy and Ravel. Indeed, Bozza’s piano/harp writing in the first and third pieces in this set is very reminiscent of Ravel.
Of the works I didn’t know, the one I found most intriguing was Algues by Bernard Andrès (a composer also unfamiliar to me). Algues translates as ‘algae’ or ‘seaweeds’; the seven short pieces (the longest is less than two minutes fifteen seconds long) which make up this work don’t have individual titles. For me they evoked images of seaweed swaying and waving in the tides and currents of the sea, perhaps beneath the surface. The music was designed for performance by a harp and either flute, oboe or violin. This is beautiful, melodic music, with a sense of dreamlike fluidity and ease combining both delicacy and a sense of restrained power. I have learned, from some online research and a phone call to a harp-playing friend, a little about Andrès. He was taught piano from the age of five and began to write pieces of his own when he was eight; that he took up the harp in his late teens and studied the instrument at Conservatoires in Besançon, Strasbourg and Paris, winning first prize for harp at the Paris Conservatoire. He worked as a harpist before gradually concentrating more on composition. My enjoyment of Algues prompted me to look for more of Andrès music online. He appears to write both in a relatively conventional style and in a more experimental idiom . In both, his work is inventive and attractive. He makes use of harp techniques of his own, such as one he refers to as “sons xylophoniques” in the performance directions of some of his scores. This involves the player holding the strings with the left hand close to the soundboard, while playing the strings normally with the right hand. This changes the timbre (producing a more muted sound), but not the pitch. This effect can be heard at the beginning of
Nos. I and VI in Algues.
All in all, this is an engaging collection which nowhere disappoints, and is finely played and well recorded.
Glyn Pursglove
