Acclaim
Rediscovered Voices in the Studio: 'Es geht wohl anders' and 'Czech Flute Music'
Czech Flute Music
Dvorak, Feld, Martinu, Schulhoff
Jeffrey Khaner, flute
Charles Abramovic, piano
(AV 2219)
Czech Flute Music Dvorak, Feld, Martinu, Schulhoff Jeffrey Khaner, flute Charles Abramovic, piano (AV 2219)
Avie Records

The overshadowed voices of the former Austro-Empire are also the subject of Czech Flute Music, the latest album of Philadelphia Orchestra Principal Flutist Jeffrey Khaner. The album features sonatas by Erwin Schulhoff, Jindrich Feld and Bohuslav Martinu as well as a Dvorák Sonatina that was originally written for violin but transcribed for both flute and viola following the work’s popularity. Schulhoff, who perished in a Bavarian concentration camp in 1942, represents the kind of musical eclecticism that, as Alex Ross writes in The Rest of Noise, was “effectively wiped out” between the wars. The composer synthesized the influences of everyone from Dvorak and Scriabin to the Second Viennese School, from the Dadaist painter George Grosz to jazz. This unself-conscious spirit of adventure also reveals itself in the other composers represented on the album, leaving the listener full of visions of how this music might have developed had twentieth-century politics taken a different turn.

Khaner and his accompanist Charles Abramovic perform exquisitely on all tracks, yet the Schulhoff leaves an indelible mark on the listener. According to liner notes by Malcolm MacDonald, the composer was at the height of his fame when he composed the sonata in 1927—a year before Erich Kleiber conducted his First Symphony in Berlin. Khaner takes a swift tempo in the opening Allegro moderato that gives the swirling melodic figures and vibrant rhythms just the right playfulness. This is music that never grows wearing, exulting in free lyricism with shades of polytonality that tease the ear. Khaner’s impeccable breath control in the elegaic line of the Aria movement ironically calls to mind an ‘endless melody,’ although the composer restores a sense of dance-like movement in the closing Rondo. The outer movements of the following sonata by Feld, written for the flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal in 1954, take this colourful, restless character a step further while revealing a taste for neo-classicism.

Martinu may be more of a household name than Schulhoff or Feld, but given the volume of chamber music he left behind, it is surprising that he is just starting to receive more attention in the western world. The rhythmic variety and structural freedom he takes in his Sonata No.1, written on Cape Cod in 1945, is fresh but soothing. As the flute chirps and muses with the piano as its anchor, Khaner and Abramovic move between the adamant and the serene with ease. Dvorak´s Sonatina in G evokes his American exile even more directly with references to Native American Indian and Negro spirituals, as the program notes explain, but clings to classical formulas that Martinu chose to overturn. The work provides a comforting familiarity but is also cast in a new light within the context of the album; the sighing melody of the Larghetto is tinged with an almost prophetic sadness before yielding to the folk-like Molto Vivace.

‘Czech Flute Music´ is currently available for purchase on Avie Records.

The recording, made at Curtis Hall in Philadelphia, could have taken more acoustic distance from the instruments so that the resonance and attacks do not come across so directly, yet this is a valuable, informative document on a rich tradition that is regaining social importance.

Rebecca Schmid, MusicalAmerica.com
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