Shadow Dances
– British Works for Flute
Alwyn: Flute Sonata; Bax: Four Pieces; L Berkeley: Sonatina; Bowen: Miniature Suite; Flute Sonata; Ferguson: Sketches, Op. 14; Vaughan Williams: Suite de Ballet
Adam Walker (flute),
Huw Watkins (piano)
Chandos CHAN 20265 77:25 mins Seventy-seven minutes of
British music for flute and piano might at first glance seem like 40 minutes too much. But that’s without taking on board the nimble and dazzling skills of flautist Adam Walker, or the individual strengths of the works presented – particularly York Bowen’s 1946 Sonata and his much earlier (and not very small) Miniature Suite. With Huw Watkins, too, we know we’re in for flexible and sensitive piano playing, responsive to every shadow and dance in all these pieces from the first half of the 20th century.
The two Bowen items never ignore the obvious delights of writing for the flute: the pastoral arabesques, the simulated bird song. But there’s an added thoughtfulness to the composer’s approach, even in the superficially slight material of his 1907 Suite. Four decades later in his Sonata, Bowen’s post-romantic universe remains intact, though with nothing sterile in any of its three movements, least of all in the brilliant scamper of the finale, marked allegro con fuoco.
In other pieces, it’s fascinating to trace the foreign influences coming and going. French dance forms and echoes of English folk song mingle in Vaughan Williams’s Suite de Ballet, while Bax’s Four Pieces, extracted from a never-orchestrated ballet score written under the sway of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, usefully offer lighter alternatives to his voluptuously scintillating symphonies. A few pieces like Alwyn’s Sonata promise more than they deliver, but a new pleasure is never far away in this most accomplished recital, full of the sounds of spring. Geoff Brown PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★