Weber didn’t write
much for chamber ensemble; the liner notes mention only nine
chamber works as catalogued by Jahns. Here, we have a lovely
set of works performed on period instruments from the Finchcocks
collection at the selfsame museum in Kent.
The only other performance
I’ve heard of the trio is the one on Kontrapunkt, recorded five
years later, with Toke Lund Christiansen, Elisabeth Westenholz
and Asger Lund Christiansen. In his liner notes for that release,
Toke Lund Christiansen mentions that he considers the Weber
flute trio one of the “absolute principal works” of the genre.
The trio proved to be the composer’s last foray into composing
chamber music.
The opening theme is
rather grave but opens up to a brighter, more hopeful second
theme which ultimately loses out in the final measures. The
morendo ending of the first movement leads us into the
Scherzo, with a stormy beginning in G minor that bursts
unexpectedly into a graceful waltz. The opening storminess contrasts
with the sunny theme, then ends decisively. The first theme,
as before, gets the last word. The following Adagio espressivo,
titled Shäfers Klage (Shepherd’s Lament), evidently
based on a folk-song is, by contrast, quite spare in its lines.
A lovely moment is the interplay between cello and flute at
2:43, with the flute in lower register. The coda of the movement
winds down gradually and fades away. The finale begins slowly
with the piano, then picks up steam and momentum as the flute
comes in.
The piece has charm,
especially the Andante and the blustery Scherzo.
Christiansen/Westenholz/Christiansen take a slower approach
to the opening movement, which to this reviewer tends to sap
the energy from certain sections. Their Scherzo is substantially
swifter, but doesn’t seem at all rushed. The movement has a
delightful sparkle. Overall, the two performances are worth
hearing — the contrast of tonality between the modern instrument
performance of Christiansen/Westenholz/Christiansen and the
period instruments of the Preston/Clarke/Burnett performance
brings out alternating areas of delight. In the Kontrapunkt
performance the modern tone of the piano gives more differentiation
between it and the pizzicato cello at the beginning which
the timbre of the period instruments tends to make more indistinct.
The lovely moment in the Adagio that I mentioned above
doesn’t hold nearly as much magic as this performance on period
instruments.
The four brief flute
sonatas (of six) were completed earlier, in 1810, originally
for piano and violin. With minor rearrangements, they were also
published, as evidenced here, for flute and piano. These small-scale
works - only half of the movements top three minutes - are lovely
pieces — unpretentious and with a primary focus on enjoyment.
A particularly nice movement is the Romanze movement
of the first sonata; an innocent and beautiful melody begun
by the piano and picked up by the flute, played with great sweetness
by Burnett and Preston. The closest we get to gravitas
is the Air Russe opening movement of the third sonata,
which begins quite seriously, but dissolves into sunny amiability
before closing with a brief re-entry of the first theme.
The recording aesthetic
is fairly good, though I would have liked the miking to have
been more intimate. In a living-room setting, the piano seems
too distant, with the flute forward, but still, overall, all
of the instruments seem rather distantly miked. Perhaps this
approach was taken to reduce the amount of action noise picked
up from the piano, which I thought I’d heard in my initial listenings,
but subsequent plays while wearing headphones do not reveal
any such noise. If you have these pieces performed on modern
instruments, this recording is very much worth getting: the
change in timbre opens up new doors to the works. An enjoyable
release.
David Blomenberg
for details 
Stephen Preston (flute)
