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Track(s) taken from SIGCD216

Flute and Harp Concerto in C major, K299

composer
cadenzas by Marius Flothuis

William Bennett (flute), Claire Jones (harp), English Chamber Orchestra, Paul Watkins (conductor)
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Recording details: February 2010
St Silas the Martyr, Kentish Town, London, United Kingdom
Produced by John H West
Engineered by Mike Hatch & Alex Foster
Release date: October 2010
Total duration: 27 minutes 31 seconds
 

Other recordings available for download

Marc Grauwels (flute), Giselle Herbert (harp), Les Violons du Roy, Bernard Labadie (conductor)

Reviews

'Mozart's Flute and Harp Concerto is here given an unusually lively performance with Paul Watkins and the ECO … very well recorded to bring out the crispness of ensemble … the result is tuneful and passionate in the extended first movement, easily lyrical in the second. The finale relies on themes with a folk flavour, culminating in an excitingly brisk coda … splendidly celebrating the artistry of Claire Jones' (Gramophone)

'Few artists have been more active in the recording studios in the past year than Claire Jones, the official harpist to Princes Charles. Her latest album, Claire Jones: Harp Concertos (4 Stars) is recommended to all harp fans and to lovers of good tunes. It winningly combines Mozart’s evergreen Flute And Harp Concerto with the veteran flautist William Bennett, Debussy’s Danse Sacree and Danse Profance, and Gliere’s Harp Concerto. Gliere’s concerto is beautifully crafted and packed full of toothsome melodies—a bit sugary perhaps but, for me, irresistible. It has always astonished me it isn’t better known. I hope Claire Jone’s excellent performance, with the English Chamber Orchestra under Paul Watkins, will bring its many merits to the attention of a wider audience' (Daily Mail)

Mozart’s Concerto in C major for flute and harp, K 299 is best understood as the last of a group of concertante works that he wrote for the flute, all in a short space of time. It was composed very soon after the two Flute Concertos K 313 and 314 and the Andante in C major, K 315, which all date from about January or February 1778 and were written while Mozart was in Mannheim. By April, when this concerto was apparently written, he had moved to Paris, and the unusual combination of solo instruments was determined by the fact that it was a commission from the Comte de Guines, Adrien-Louis Bonnières de Souastre, a former French envoy to England, who was a keen amateur flautist. His flute had an extension that allowed him to play the low notes D flat and C, not then available on a normal flute, and this is the only flute work in which Mozart calls for those pitches. His daughter, who was having composition lessons from Mozart, was a capable harp player—she played ‘magnifique’ according to Mozart’s letters. But four months later, he was complaining that he still hadn’t been paid for the work!

In fact one might have expected that the commission would hardly have inspired Mozart, who professed to dislike both solo instruments (there is no other work by Mozart featuring a harp) and had a low opinion of French musical taste. Yet he duly delivered the concerto, and thereby produced a work that has remained popular throughout the two succeeding centuries. (Works for flute and harp were later to become much more common than in Mozart’s time.) Some critics, it is true—such as Charles Rosen, in his book The Classical Style—have deplored the concerto as ‘hackwork’: though Rosen qualifies this by remarking ‘it is true that Mozart’s hackwork is a lesser composer’s inspiration, and his craftsmanship is significant even here’. In fact whatever Mozart felt about the two instruments individually, in combination they seem to have excited his imagination to produce music both blithe and sophisticated. Harp technique was not very far advanced in the late eighteenth century, and the instrument was often treated as a sort of plucked piano. To some extent this is also Mozart’s approach—especially in the patterns of five and ten notes that occur in all three movements (harpists are generally more comfortable with four-note and eight-note patterns)—but there are many places in the concerto where it is clear that the distinctive timbre and sonority of the harp was very much in his mind. The small orchestral forces (there are just two oboes, two horns, and strings) the concerto is well suited for the intimacy of salon performance.

Formally the work is almost a textbook example of an early Mozart concerto. At the outset the orchestra blithely introduces two contrasted themes (the second announced by the horn), which are then taken up by the soloists. As the movement progresses the soloists sometimes play with the orchestra, and sometimes form an unaccompanied duo while the orchestra is silent. Harp and flute have the melody and its accompaniment alternately, and are also often in counterpoint with each other, creating a charming dialogue. The formal development section is quite brief, leading to a full recapitulation, withspace for a cadenza, and a coda.

The exquisite slow movement, an Andantino in F major, is enriched in texture by the fact that the violas are divided throughout. The main subject, ushered in by the strings, beings in short phrases but these become longer, and the movement evolves as a set of increasingly florid variations on this opening theme, displaying the lyrical qualities of the two solo instruments against a sensitive orchestral backdrop. Mozart titled the finale ‘Rondeau’, perhaps in deference to his French flautist-patron, but also perhaps to signal the fact that this substantial movement is not quite a conventional rondo-finale. The form is an almost symmetrical seven-section one, A-B-C-D-C-B-A, with a cadenza before the final appearance of A, so that it is more like an arch-form that unwinds from its mid-point. Nevertheless traces of the ‘A’ section are to be heard in sections C and D, so the music seems in any case to honour the rondo principle of recurrence. Whatever the structure, the effect is the same—that of a joyous succession of memorable tunes.

from notes by Malcolm MacDonald © 2010

Other albums featuring this work

Mozart: Complete Music for Flute
CDS44011/33CDs Boxed set (at a special price) — Download only
Mozart: Flute Concertos
CDA66393Download only
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