Original Romantic Music for Flute and Guitar
Leonhard von Call (1767-1815)
Duo, Op.87 (?1806)
Serenade, Op.132
Pot Pourri aus deutschen und italienischen Opern (c.1813)
Serenade, Op.19 (c.1805)
Jacques Pierre Joseph Rode (1774-1830)
Polonaise (1813)
Sabine Dreier (flute), Agustín Maruri (guitar)
rec. 2000, Santa Eufemia de Cozollos, Olmas de Ojeda, Spain
EMEC E-040 [77]
Rode is the better-known of the two composers whose music is recorded on this disc. However, such fame as he has owes more to his career as a violinist than to the music he wrote. Von Call, on the other hand, didn’t have the kind of international profile as a performer that Rode had.
Much the greater part of this disc is, though, given over to the music of Leonhard von Call – the one piece by Rode, his Polonaise, occupies only four minutes and 14 seconds of the disc’s playing time of 76 minutes 48 seconds – so it might be as well to begin with von Call both for that reason and because he is the lesser-known figure. Of the relatively few works in which I have found details about von Call, a few give 1768 as the date of his birth and more carry the date 1769. The (unsigned) booklet notes accompanying this disc mention this ‘disagreement’, yet the track listing provided gives his date of birth as 1779 (!). I take this to be an error not noticed at the stage of proof-reading. There is no disagreement as to where von Call was born. His birthplace was Eppan an der Weinstrasse in the Tyrol, then under Austrian rule. It has been part of Italy since 1919 and is now known as Appiano. Von Call is known to have studied mandolin, guitar and flute during his youth. From 1801 von Call lived in Vienna, where he had a position in the civil service, working in the court treasury. He also began to teach guitar and mandolin, while also finding time to write for both instruments. His earliest publications appeared in 1802. One might, I suppose, see him has having an important role in encouraging the Viennese fashion for the guitar which was to reach its height after the arrival in the city of Mauro Giuliani in 1806. Philip J. Bone in his still-valuable work of 1914, The Guitar and Mandolin: biographies of celebrated players and composers for these instruments, writes (p.61) “He was … a recognized virtuoso on the mandolin and guitar, though the number of his public performances was limited”. Von Call seems to have been more interested in encouraging amateurs to take up the instruments and in providing them with music that was pleasant to play – pleasant, but not excessively demanding technically. Significantly, the full title of the Duo which opens this CD is ‘Duo très facile pour Flûte et Guitarre’.
But being ‘facile’ doesn’t necessarily make a musical work uninteresting for the listener. Though it may be easy to play, technically-speaking, it can still require interpretative skills. Such skills are certainly evident in these performances by the German flautist Sabine Dreier and the Spanish guitarist Agustín Maruri. Maruri is a very accomplished solo guitarist but he is also both contented and accomplished as a chamber musician, as evidenced by the various recordings he has made with English cellist Michael Kevin Jones. In Sabine Dreier he found another musically compatible partner.
The Duo, Op. 87 is in seven short movements: ‘Marcia’, ‘Andantino’, ‘Menuetto cantabile. Trio’, ‘Adagio’, ‘Allegretto scherzando’, ‘Adagio’ and ‘Allegretto. Trio’. The whole is thoroughly pleasant, in a quietly undemonstrative idiom. The first movement, marked ‘Marcia’, for example, has more to do with children playing soldiers than anything von Call might have experienced when he served in the War of the First Coalition (1782-87), in the early stages of the French Revolutionary Wars; here, the music is playful rather than warlike. This Duo is essentially domestic music, music which might be played in a bourgeois home for the pleasure of family and friends by a couple of decent amateur musicians. All of its movements have a simple charm especially the third, a nicely lyrical minuet and trio and the closing ‘Allegretto. Trio’ with its jaunty rhythms.
The Serenade (Op.132), which follows, also consists of seven movements with a very similar arrangement: Marsche-Andantino-Menuetto cantabile. Trio-Adagio-Menuetto moderato. Trio-Andante-Allegretto. Trio. There isn’t, I think, much here to which I would apply the epithet ‘Romantic’, as the title of the disc does; this is music happy to operate within the expectations of Viennese classicism. The flute part here, while by no means virtuosic, is slightly more demanding than that of the Duo.
Elsewhere, the Pot-Pourri aus deutschen und italienischen Opern is somewhat more sophisticated, being structurally more complex and more varied in dynamics and rhythm. The social world conjured up here is rather grander, perhaps an aristocratic salon, compared to the two works which precede it on this disc. Its three movements use material from three different operas then well-known to a cultured Viennese audience. The first movement draws on material from Boildieu’s Johann von Paris – premiered, as Jean de Paris at the Opéra Comique in April 1812 – of which there were performances in the same year, with German libretti, at two different Viennese theatres, the Theater Kärtnertor (libretto by Ignaz Franz Castelli) and the Theater an der Wein (libretto by Ignaz von Seyfried). Part two of von Call’s ‘Pot-Pourri’ is based on Spontini’s La Vestale, premiered in Paris in 1807, which was performed in Vienna – as Die Vestalin – in 1811. Von Call ends his operatic Pot-Pourri with music from the singspiel Der Schweizaer Familie by the Austrian composer/conductor Joseph Weigl (1766-1846). Given that Boildieu’s opera didn’t reach Vienna until April 1812, and that von Call died in February 1815, the ‘Pot-Pourri’ musy have been written in the last years of the composer’s life, say around 1813/14. The whole provides just over thirteen minutes of urbane musical entertainment, played delightfully by Dreier and Maruri.
The disc closes with the one piece by the famous French violinist Jacques Pierre Joseph Rode (1774-1830). Rode had a meteoric rise to fame as a violinist, but his career later ended rather sadly. Born in Bordeaux, he was something of a prodigy, playing public concerts by the age of twelve. In 1787 he made his way to Paris where he studied with the great Giovanni Battista Viotti. Viotti was reportedly so impressed by the youthful Rode that he chose not to charge him for lessons. Rose made his Paris debut in 1790, playing Viotti’s Concerto No.13; this and later concerts were so successful that in 1795 he was appointed first Professor of Violin at the Paris Conservatoire, founded in the same year. However, he immediately took extended leave from the Conservatoire to tour as a soloist in Germany, Holland and London. It was only in 1799 that he returned to the Conservatoire; in 1800 he was made solo violinist to Napoleon. In 1803 he accepted an invitation to visit the Russian Court in St. Petersburg, giving concerts in Germany en route. He stayed at St. Petersburg as solo violinist to Tsar Alexander I between 1804 and 1808. For whatever reason, his playing seems never to have been so good after this period in Russia. When he gave a concert in Paris in December 1808, neither his playing nor his new Concerto (No. 13) were much liked. Spohr heard Rode in Vienna in 1812 and judged his playing to have deteriorated. He based himself in Berlin from 1814 to 1818, before returning, with his family, to Bordeaux. Around this time he ceased to play the violin, but continued to compose. His ‘Polonaise’ was written after his career as a violinist had passed its zenith, but it displays no trace of sadness or disappointment, being a colourful and attractive piece. Unlike most ‘classical’ polonaises it makes me want to get up and dance. Dreier and Maruri play it with a balance of charm and energy.
None of the music on this disc is challenging or startling; it is relaxed and relaxing. After a fretful morning spent struggling with an intractable bibliographical database, an afternoon listening to this disc proved thoroughly restorative – as William Congreve put it (The Mourning Bride, 1697), “music hath charms to soothe”.
Glyn Pursglove
