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This disc is now available on the Beep label, BP 34. You can obtain it by writing to Beep Records at mmichie@msn.com.

Tracks

Napoléon Coste (1806–1883)
Le Montagnard (Divertissement Pastoral), opus 34[a]
Introduction (Allegro) [1]
Andantino [2]
Rondeau Montagnard (Allegretto) [3]

Toru Takemitsu (1930–1996)
Toward the Sea (1981) for alto flute & guitar
The Night [4]
Moby Dick [5]
Cape Cod [6]

Francesco Molino (1768–1847)
Nocturne Nº 2, opus 38
Andante [7]
Rondo (Allegro) [8]

Stephen Dodgson (b. 1924)
Capriccio (1981) [9]

Robert Beaser (b. 1954)
Barbara Allen [10]
The House Carpenter [11]
He’s Gone Away [12]
Hush You Bye [13]
Cindy [14]
(from Mountain Songs)

Notes on the Music

TOWARDS the end of 1818, Francesco Molino, a fifty-year-old violinist in the orchestra of the Regia Cappella of Turin, made a bold decision: to resign his secure and well-paid position, move to Paris, and support himself primarily as a guitarist. Within a couple of years he was installed in the French capital, styling himself ‘Violinist of the Cappella of His Majesty the King of Sardinia’. Molino found in Paris a bustling centre of guitar activity, and he thrived on the growing demand for guitar publications. He composed virtuoso solo works, chamber music, and even a concerto for guitar and orchestra. Enthusiasm for the guitar was not to last for ever: at the time of Molino’s death in 1847, it was suffering a decline in popularity, even respectability, and Molino’s last compositions were for the violin.

The Nocturne in D, opus 38, was published in 1825 and is one of several works for flute and guitar by Molino, with violin mentioned as an alternative to the flute. Not too much poetic significance should be drawn from the title; a decade earlier, John Field had coined the term nocturne (in the French) to describe his lyrical and evocative character pieces for piano, but that sense is absent here. Indeed, the pairing of Andante and Rondo found in Molino’s Nocturne was already familiar under the more prosaic title of ‘Sonata’. However this may be, Molino’s gift for a good tune is wonderfully in evidence throughout, delicately embellished in the Andante, bursting with infectious good spirits in the Rondo.

Napoléon Coste, the most remarkable French guitarist of the nineteenth century, came to Paris in 1830, a decade or so after Molino. Coste’s career thus developed in the same atmosphere of neglect that was to affect the older composer – for years he maintained a position as a civil servant and published most of his compositions himself. Like his teacher, Fernando Sor, Coste had a wide musical culture, which extended even to an interest in the literature for baroque guitar. Unusually, his works for melody instrument and guitar specify the oboe first and foremost, with the violin as a second choice. We could not resist the temptation to ‘steal’ Le Montagnard and give it to the flute: its three movements make up one of the gems of nineteenth-century guitar repertoire, rejecting the guitar’s usual accompanimental role in favour of an animated conversation between friends.

The remaining works in this collection date from within four years of one another, 1981 (Dodgson, Takemitsu) to 1985 (Beaser). Strongly idiomatic for both instruments, at first hearing they hardly seem imaginable for anything other than flute and guitar. In fact, Takemitsu’s Toward the Sea was twice transcribed by the composer for other forces (alto flute and harp, and alto flute, harp and strings). And Robert Beaser’s Mountain Songs include a movement (not recorded here) first published as a song with piano, while the whole set draws on the rich tradition of American folksong.

Stephen Dodgson’s Capriccio, at least, is unthinkable for any other combination. It is one of the most rewarding of all flute and guitar pieces, not surprisingly from a composer who has been so generous in his output for both instruments. Now approaching his eightieth year, Dodgson has recently been cultivating a divertimento-like style which takes the listener unawares by its capacity to move (his Concerto for flute and strings has been recorded and is a superb example of this later manner). Capriccio comes from an earlier, more astringent period, marked by driving rhythms and spare textures. And yet the same deep expressivity lies at the heart of the music, unfolding to its full potential in the last slow section before the end. In Dodgson’s own words:

Capriccio has an integrated single-movement design, consisting of short sections of strongly contrasted motion and character. Though the moods interrupt each other and give rise to capricious design, the themes tend toward obstinacy. Especially significant is a poignant short phrase which appears in the first slow section. Later this grows to prime importance until finally driven out by a brief reprise of the lively opening music.

Where Stephen Dodgson provides a map, Toru Takemitsu, commenting on Toward the Sea, is more elusive: ‘In this pastoral, picture-like piece, the three notes, E-flat (termed ‘es’ in German), E and A, which coincide with the letters of SEA, motivate the melody.’ And on another occasion, ‘The music is a homage to the sea which creates all things and a sketch for the sea of tonality.’

The reference to Melville in the second movement’s title has an immediate context, for Toward the Sea was commissioned by the Greenpeace Foundation for its Save the Whales campaign. Takemitsu quotes the following passage from Moby Dick:

Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries…and he will infallibly lead you to water…Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded together.

The presence, or coincidence, of the word sea in musical notation is intriguing. Many composers (notably Bach and Shostakovich) have played with the possibility of putting words into music through the convention of naming notes with letters, and the sea motive is a frequent motto in a whole series of works which Takemitsu composed during the 1980s, all inspired by the subject of water, rain, or the sea. Here, the motive may be heard (transposed) in the alto flute in the first three notes of ‘Moby Dick’ and the last three notes of ‘Cape Cod’, but it also permeates melody and harmony throughout the score, albeit often in very occluded forms.

Takemitsu’s comparison of Toward the Sea with a picture, suggesting a more spatial than dynamic experience, is borne out by the faceted, mosaic-like form of its three movements. Various textures drift in and out, above all in ‘Cape Cod’, which increasingly recalls a passage from ‘The Night’. One is reminded not so much of a narrative or drama as of the way the eye looks at a painting or landscape, following its own path, dwelling on some objects, returning for a closer look at others; and all the while, the different areas reflect one another’s light like a mosaic – or like the sea.

What of Takemitsu’s allusion to a ‘sea of tonality’ in the remarks quoted above? In one – rather esoteric – sense, he is referring to a complex of notes constructed around the sea motive that appears here and there in the work. But there is a wider meaning, too. The image of the river flowing into the ocean had a great poignancy for the Japanese composer: a year before undertaking Toward the Sea, he had written a substantial piece for violin and orchestra, Far calls. Coming far!, its title taken from the monologue at the close of Finnegans Wake, in which the desire of the river for the sea is explored to sublime effect. By now, Takemitsu’s once experimental language was beginning to owe more and more to the vocabulary of traditional tonality. Many of his comments from that time suggest that he saw his music becoming absorbed into tonality, just as a river becomes a part of the sea ‘which creates all things’.

None of this can prepare us for the astonishing beauty of Takemitsu’s sound world. The writing for alto flute seems to recall the Japanese shakuhachi in its highly nuanced colours and ornaments, many of them requiring special fingerings and techniques; the guitar’s sonorities are so sensitively treated that for this recording we decided to use the ten-string guitar so as to allow more ringing-over of certain notes and harmonics.

Robert Beaser completed his Mountain Songs in 1985 and they have quickly taken their place in the repertoire as a classic. The entire collection numbers eight songs, and our selection of the first five for this disc is one of several smaller sets approved by the composer. Each song is based more or less loosely on a traditional American folk tune, typically from the southern mountains of Appalachia. ‘Cindy’, however, is a minstrel fiddle song and ‘Hush You Bye’ a popular lullaby from the deep South. Some of the other songs are very old and were brought across the Atlantic from the British Isles, such as ‘Barbara Allen’ (referred to by Samuel Pepys as ‘the little Scottish tune’ in his diaries of 1666) and ‘The House Carpenter’ (a seventeenth-century lyric ballad known in England and Scotland).

The stanzaic form of the originals, with the tune repeated a number of times to different words, is retained in Beaser’s elaborations, but what is fascinating is the stylistic prism through which each song is passed: ‘Barbara Allen’ is a plainsong with blue notes, wrapped in bell sounds (here again, we found the resonance of the ten-string guitar especially appropriate); ‘The House Carpenter’ takes the flute through a range of colours against a ‘steely’ guitar accompaniment; ‘Hush You Bye’, with its cumulative design, is called Fantasia and looks like a baroque passacaglia on the page; while ‘Cindy’ invokes the minstrel song spirit with fiddler’s slides, perilous cross-rhythms and mock hesitations, all to be performed ‘with rambunctious charm’. Most haunting of all, perhaps, is the setting of ‘He’s Gone Away’. The outer sections present the melody simply and haltingly; each time the opening phrase, or call, is heard, it seems to ring a little longer, or look a little further into the distance – and just for a few moments one forgets that the song of the flute is a song without words:

He’s gone away for to stay a little while,
But he’s coming back if he goes ten thousand miles.
Oh who will tie my shoe,
And who will glove my hand,
And who will kiss my ruby lips when he is gone?

Look away, Look away,
Over yonder…

Jonathan Leathwood
Copyright © 2002

*

Biography of William Bennett (for more information go to www.wibb.co.uk).

ONE of the foremost musical artists performing today, William Bennett has raised the profile of the flute to that of an instrument capable of a wide range of tone colours, dynamics and expression, giving it the depth, dignity and grandeur of the voice or a string instrument.

He studied in London with Geoffrey Gilbert, and in France with Jean-Pierre Rampal and Marcel Moyse, and has been principal flautist in many orchestras including the London Symphony, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and the English Chamber Orchestra.

Marcel Moyse’s now legendary masterclasses, held in Switzerland in the late seventies, provided an extra stimulus and inspiration to William Bennett, in tandem with his burgeoning career as an international soloist and recording artist. His partnerships with Clifford Benson (piano) and George Malcolm (harpsichord), and his solo recordings with Yehudi Menuhin, the Grumiaux Trio, I Musici, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and the English Chamber Orchestra have received international acclaim and enthusiastic reviews in record and CD journals.

Early in his career he made the first recording in the UK of all of Handel’s flute sonatas, and of contemporary works including the Sonatine by Boulez, Berio’s Sequenza, Messiaen’s Merle Noir and Richard Rodney Bennett’s Winter Music (this last written for him). More recently he has premiered concertos by William Mathias and Diana Burrell, and the Concerto for flute and flute orchestra by Venezuelan composer Raymund Pineda. All of these were specially written for him.

In addition to recording the standard flute repertoire of Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Mozart and others, he has made pioneering recordings of many neglected nineteenth-century works, including music by Ries, Romberg and Taffanel. He has made over a hundred compact discs as a soloist, and has recorded with such artists as Jimi Hendrix and Wynton Marsalis.

William Bennett’s more recent recordings include Concertos for a New Era (works for flute and orchestra by Mathias, Burrell, Pineda and Musgrave), and two new works by Dave Heath with the English Chamber Orchestra. His constant search to extend the repertoire and possibilities of the flute have pushed him not only to playing new works, but to making daring transcriptions and developing the instrument itself: his latest recording of works by Haydn and Mozart for flute and orchestra include his own arrangement of Mozart’s Concerto K 218 for the ‘flauto di bassetto’ – an instrument devised and constructed by William Bennett to extend the flute’s range a minor third below the usual lowest note of middle C.

Recent concert engagements have taken him to the USA, Switzerland, Japan, Venezuela, China, Taiwan, Canada, Australia, Italy, Bermuda and elsewhere.

In January 1995, HM The Queen presented William Bennett with the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his distinguished services to music.