MICHAEL SCHUBERT studied flute at California State University Northridge and before embarking on a professional career in Germany that has included symphony, opera, chamber music, and numerous performances as a soloist throughout Germany, France, and Spain. He solo work has included over 10 CD productions, including the complete piccolo concerti of Vivaldi.
SYLVIA GOTTSTEIN is a native of Bavaria, a national prizewinner of "Jugend musiziert," and a graduate with honors of the Conservatory of Music and the Performing Arts in Stuttgart.
Artwork by VICTORIA GLICK (vickglick@mac.com).
GAETANO DONIZETTI enjoys lasting fame as the composer of such beloved operas as Lucia di Lammermoor, L’Elisir d’Amore, Don Pasquale and La fille du régiment. In the 25 years during which he actively composed, he wrote some 75 operas. Lesser known are the large number of non-operatic works he also composed, including concerti; orchestral, chamber and sacred music; piano works and songs. The composer’s operatic style is easily heard in the aria-like Larghetto for flute (or violin) and harp.
The immensely prolific American composer ALAN HOVHANESS began writing music at an early age and is said to have composed as many as one thousand works by his early thirties. His growing interest in ethnomusicology—and in particular the music and history of his father’s Armenian homeland—led him to become dissatisfied with these early works, most of which were destroyed. His equally numerous compositions after this time include over 50 symphonies and hundreds of works for a diverse range of Western and Oriental instruments, voice, and even humpback whales (on tape). His music, borrowing much from the Impressionists, is characterized by chant-like pentatonic melodies and an avoidance of diatonic harmony, and contrasts strikingly with the serial, aleatory and atonal practices of his better-known contemporaries.
GEORGES BIZET’s Carmen can arguably be called the best-known and best-loved opera of all time. Its première in the year of Bizet’s early death was not so auspicious, however, and the composer never lived to see its enormous success. The enchanting Entr’acte to Act III, evoking the nocturnal calm and wild beauty of the Andalusian mountains before the entrance of the smugglers, features the flute and the harp so prominently that it needs little revision to function as a duet.
FRIEDRICH WILHELM RUST was born in Wörlitz in Saxony and spent most of his creative life in nearby Dessau, where he did much to enrich the cultural life. His influence was decisive, for example, in the duke’s decision to build an opera house there in 1774. His output includes a comic opera, diverse stage music, sonatas, cantatas and other vocal music. For a time in the 19th century he enjoyed a certain posthumous fame for his piano sonatas, which seemed to have foreshadowed Beethoven’s innovations in that form. After it was discovered that his grandson, a musicologist, had altered the manuscripts to make them more progressive than they in fact were, Rust’s music was long neglected. The A-major sonata heard here may also be performed with violin or oboe in place of the flute.
CARL NIELSEN is without contention Denmark’s proudest musical son, and his instrumental music—including six symphonies, various overtures, and concerti for violin, flute and clarinet—are established in the international repertoire. His lesser-known vocal compositions include two operas, songs and choral-orchestral cantatas. The brief and charming composition The Fog is Lifting was written as music for Helge Rode’s play The Mother.
The Parisian harpist BERNARD ANDRÈS is the youngest composer represented on this disc, and though he has not won wide fame, his Algues (literally: algae) is a well-known work in the flute/harp repertoire. The seven brief movements are written in an intimate and transparent style, with hauntingly simple melodic lines that grow increasingly melancholy towards the work’s end. The composer employs a colorful range of harp techniques, while the flute part remains almost exclusively in the warmer low range of the instrument, having been conceived alternatively for the oboe.
CLAUDE DEBUSSY’s Syrinx was originally entitled La flûte de Pan and written as an interlude in Gabriel Mourey’s drama Psyché, where it represented Pan’s last song. “Syrinx” is the Greek word for the panpipes. The legend says that Syrinx was once a fair maiden, who found the favor of the god Pan but resisted his advances and even mocked his half-human, half-goat form. Fleeing his pursuits, she finally collapsed in a bed of reeds. Pan cut the reeds and fashioned her essence into the flute that bears her name. Debussy’s 1913 composition is an evocative piece of great color and longing, and remains the very pinnacle of the solo flute literature.
The Paris Conservatory already had a long tradition of commissioning new French works when GABRIEL FAURÉ wrote his brilliant Impromptu as an examination piece for the harp students there in the summer of 1904. Its key of D-flat major is said to have been Fauré’s favorite, and despite its technical challenges, the work is among the most popular in the solo harp repertoire. Like so much of Fauré’s work, it combines elements of late Romanticism and early Impressionism with the composer’s own lyrical style. In 1913 Fauré reworked the piece as the Impromptu no. 6 for piano.
ALAN HOVHANESS’s The Garden of Adonis (1971) takes its title from a canto in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, describing a garden of rebirth where souls appear as flowers. In Greek legend the fair Adonis, god of flora and nature, embodied the cycle of the seasons and the mystery of nature. He was born of a tree into which his mother had transformed herself. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, was so taken by the beauty of the infant that she hid him away in a trunk. When she told her secret to Persephone, the goddess of the underworld, she too looked into the trunk and fell so in love that she took Adonis away for herself. Aphrodite appealed to Zeus for intervention, and he declared that Adonis should spend half the year on Earth with Aphrodite (symbolized by spring and summer) and half the year in the underworld with Persephone (symbolized by autumn and winter). While still in the full bloom of his youthly beauty, Adonis was killed hunting a boar. Legend has it that anemones sprang from his spilt blood and roses from the tears of Aphrodite. In botany, a garden in which plants are cultivated to bloom early (and as a result wither prematurely) is called a “garden of Adonis.”
Read more...