Stéphanie d'Oustrac / Thibaut Roussel / Tanguy de Williencourt UNE SOIRÉE CHEZ BERLIOZ

UNE SOIRÉE CHEZ BERLIOZ

Le Concert de la Loge / Julien Chauvin HAYDN L'Ours

The well-known Concert de la Loge, the period-instruments orchestra led by the violinist Julien Chauvin, comes back with the third episode of Haydn’s journey in Paris. His complete Parisian Symphonies recording continues this fall with the number 82 nicknamed “The Bear”. It is coupled with the Symphonie concertante for bassoon, horn, flute and oboe of one of his contemporaries, François Devienne.

This colorful third volume draws a witty and virtuoso panorama of French 18th century music.

Sara Ligas / Salvatore Rea / Vladimiro Atzeni DEVIENNE 6 Trios for Flute, Viola and Cello

Bewitching chamber music from a virtuoso flautist and French contemporary of Mozart.

This set of divertimento-like sonatas belongs to Devienne’s period in service to Cardinal de Rohan during the first half of the 1780s, though the manuscript is dedicated to another French nobleman. It is the work of a highly accomplished musician in his early 20s: already the master of his art as a performer on the flute, providing for himself and his patrons music to delight the imagination without straining for depth and profundity. Unlike Devienne’s concertos, which naturally featured virtuoso solo parts, his chamber music tended to avoid excessive technical difficulties because it was largely intended for an audience of aristocratic amateur musicians.

The sonatas are all cast in two movements, none of them especially slow except for a melancholy Siciliano to open the Third, which is the only one of the set written in a minor key. Gracefulness is the quality enshrined both by Devienne’s expressive markings and by the fluid charm of his melodies. The scoring for an ensemble resembling that of the Baroque trio sonata makes this music more accessible to a wider audience than the trios for three flutes with which the composer is more fully represented on record: there are no comparable versions of these works presently available, making this disc a highly appealing acquisition for anyone curious about the byways of Classical-era chamber music.

Emmanuel Pahud REVOLUTION

Flutist Emmanuel Pahud has a knack for bringing the 18th century alive, and with this quartet of flute concertos he attempts to follow up his successful earlier release The Flute King, which included flute concertos from the orbit of Prussia's King Frederick the Great. Even allowing for the fact that musical-social correspondences aren't always as easy to detect as when Beethoven dedicated his Symphony No. 3 to Napoleon and then retracted the dedication, this program is a bit more diffuse in its concept than the last one. Only two of the concertos, by Devienne and Gianella, actually date from the revolutionary period, and none of the four shows much impact of the big operatic style of Spontini that influenced Beethoven and other composers. Pahud in a note sets out the Flute Concerto in G major by (probably) Gluck as a representative of the ancien régime, but if anything with its sensuous slow movement it seems strikingly modern. None of this is to say that the individual pieces, all (even the disputed Gluck work) pretty much unknown, aren't a lot of fun. Jean-Pierre Rampal used to play several of these works in concert, and Pahud seems to have set his mind on being Rampal's successor. That's a worthy aim, and with the confident virtuosity and fine breath control in big lines he seems well on his way to achieving the goal. Check out especially the Flute Concerto No. 7 in E minor by François Devienne, known in his time as the French Mozart; the lively, alert accompaniment by the Kammerorchester Basel under Giovanni Antonini is a major enhancement to Pahud's work here. A worthwhile flute release reminiscent of the Rampal classics. (James Manheim)