When Sharon Bezaly releases a new album, the critic’s job is
basically to inform you that it exists. She’s so good, so consistent,
and so adventurous, that it’s nearly impossible to go wrong. Here she
tackles the well-known Nielsen
Flute Concerto, with admirably crisp,
incisive accompaniment by the Residentie Orkest and Neeme Järvi - those
thrilling timpani. Then it’s on to less well-known works like the gay
American impressionist Charles Griffes’
Poem, a sort of
Debussy-goes-west tone picture. Carl Reinecke’s rather old-fashioned
concerto, from the Germanic school of Mendelssohn, sticks to gentle lyricism
and weaves the flute through almost every bar. When the flute is silent, the
clarinet is playing, as at the start of finale, where it seems to hijack the
concerto. Maybe it’s Bezaly’s constant presence, but for once
Järvi’s icy demeanour doesn’t de-romanticize the affair.
Although the miniatures by Chaminade and Tchaikovsky are appealing,
my favourite works are the two saved for last. Francis Poulenc’s flute
sonata is unutterably wonderful and a classic. This is an orchestration by
his friend Lennox Berkeley, who does a better job than I had expected. My
colleague
Brian Wilson says he might even prefer this to the original.
I’ve certainly listened to it many times over, even separately from
the rest of the album. Then there’s the encore, an imaginative,
Technicolor rewrite of
Flight of the Bumblebee by Kalevi Aho. Bezaly
dances through a flurry of notes while the brass section snarls and the rest
of the orchestra moves like pieces in a kaleidoscope.
Although the violins get audibly lazy from 7:25 in the Griffes work,
the orchestra is generally very good, with piercing horns and
Järvi’s usual rhythmically snappy percussion sections. The
recorded sound, on the FLACs I downloaded from
eClassical, is pretty much astonishing. If you want to show off
your stereo system with a flute album for some reason, this is the one.
Brian Reinhart
Previous review:
Dave Billinge
[69:25]
