Mozart famously disliked
the flute. Writing to his father in
1778 at the time he had been commissioned
to compose some flute concertos and
quartets by the wealthy Dutch amateur
flautist De Jean, he complained that
he was ‘quite powerless’ to compose
for an instrument that he disliked.
Flautists of the time were of course
performing on quite different instruments
to the ones we are accustomed to hearing
now. The Baroque ‘traverso’ had been
souped up a little with a wobbly variety
of extra keys in order to allow more
harmonic flexibility, but it was to
be a good 50 years or so before Theobald
Boehm came up with his new mechanism,
the one on which all modern instruments
are now based. Mozart himself played
both the well established violin and
the well-tempered piano. The primitive
nature of the flute - a relatively soft
sounding wooden tube held together with
leather and string and which was hard
enough to play in tune by serious professionals,
let alone wealthy amateurs - would have
been quite a restriction on his expressive
palette. After composing the G major
concerto he ran out of creative steam,
and the D major concerto is ‘merely’
an arrangement of an oboe concerto in
C (K.271k).
Enough of the history.
These performances are of course unashamedly
modern, with Laurel Zucker playing on
a brilliant sounding Powell flute. The
flute and orchestra are well enough
balanced in a nice, not too resonant
acoustic, giving the performances a
pleasant, almost chamber-music quality.
There is of course a certain amount
of competition on this terrain, but
I’m glad to say that Zucker is more
listenable than Galway, and cheaper
than Pahud on EMI (but only just).
Many performers will
agree that Mozart is one of the most
difficult composers to play perfectly.
The demands of re-creating a version
of perfection in a sound world which
is of itself a form of perfection are
those which can be the greatest test
of a player. Ask the soloist after a
live performance of a Mozart concerto
if he or she was completely happy with
every aspect of his or her performance,
and you will almost always elicit a
wry grimace, a brief shake of the head,
and a short press statement: ‘well,
that cadence after the recap could have
been more together ...’ or some such
caveat. Sensitive musicians will grow
to respect Mozart as one of their biggest
challenges, and will of course have
dutifully read their Quantz, Rousseau
or Sulzer on performance practice of
the time.
Zucker seems to have
her own ideas on this kind of thing,
and will no doubt be able to defend
them, though the fundamental disagreements
with the orchestra would tend to make
this something of a struggle. Taking
the first movement of K.313, the orchestral
exposition has the orchestra taking
a lively, bouncy, well-articulated view
of the opening theme, with the two eighth
notes in the second bar well separated.
Zucker’s entry is completely different,
with the quarter notes of her first
bar and the following eighths nicely
legato, spreading the rhythm like peanut
butter. In Mozart, the first note of
the bar, or that on the stronger beat,
generally receives the most emphasis.
Take the 7th bar after the
flute entry in this movement – only
two notes, G to C, in which the C would
most certainly be the ‘weaker’. Zucker
sings it out with joyous abandon, and
the correctly phrased orchestral answer
sounds a little sheepish by comparison.
It may be a matter of taste, and I know
Zucker makes no claim to make this a
‘period’ performance, but if she were
a student I’d be asking her ‘why?’ In
the second movement there is that charming
little upward turn at the end of the
first phrase, which the orchestra (to
my mind) correctly plays with a slight
diminuendo and a slight shortening of
the last note each time it returns.
Zucker plants the last note on us firmly,
giving it its full eighth-note value,
making the phrase rather four-square
and losing the character of that little
motief. I don’t want to bore on about
this, but it’s one of the things which
has turned me off most frequently about
this recording.
Zucker has written
her own, commendable cadenzas for the
concertos, and her technique is of course
above reproach. Her intonation in the
concertos is often into the upper half
of the note – a typical symptom of projecting
over an orchestra which is more noticeable
when there are half a dozen microphones
making such projection less necessary.
This slight problem is less noticeable
(if not entirely absent) in the quartet,
which is nicely balanced and performed
with well judged tempi, and in which
Laurel Zucker’s phrasing is entirely
more consistent with the other players
than in the concertos.
This production lacks
a little in sonic gloss and refinement,
and has enough rough moments to prevent
me making an unreserved recommendation
(the flat oboe entry at 6:05 in the
first movement of K.314 – ouch!), but
as ever the uncritical listener who
can find this at budget price somewhere
will find little about which to complain.
Dominy Clements
Laurel Zucker (flute) 
