Mozart: Flute Concertos

Stylishly performed, well executed performances, nicely recorded, are always welcome in my listening room. And this new collection of Mozart delighted me. Anna Besson's performance on flute is fresh, agile, and utterly beguiling. Clara Izambert on the period harp (1820) is a perfect partner in the Concerto for Flute & Harp, both when taking the lead and when supporting. The liner notes comment that the cadenzas for flute and harp were freely inspired by cadenzas by Robert D. Levin and Paul Badura-Skoda, so definitively good DNA at work here.

The flute concertos were composed by Mozart on a commission from Ferdinand Dejean, an amateur flautist and retired surgeon of the Dutch East India Company. Mozart termed them "some simple, short little concertinos." But these pieces in fact demand great virtuosity from the soloist, as well as a sensitivity to tonal nuances. They have been popular fare ever since.

The Concerto for Flute and Harp was written on a later commission during Mozart's time in Paris. This time for a flute-playing aristocrat and his harpist daughter to perform as a duo of soloists. And for this commission, the flute playing father had a more contemporary flute with eight keys (versus the single key in the earlier commission), allowing the flute to reach down to middle C, and to play in the hitherto impractical key of C. Now, those of you who are musicians may understand all of this. I'm simply reporting from the liner notes because I find it fascinating. It certainly makes this work sound more complex and varied.

Anna Besson has been among the top flute soloists performing in recent years. Her playing is just marvelously fluid and nuanced. She is an active and versatile performer regularly found performing both as a soloist and as an orchestral musician within ensembles. And, she is fully comfortable 18th- and 19th-century chamber music repertoire on both modern flute and baroque traverso flute.

She is a musician whom I look forward to hearing each time she releases an album. Hopefully, NativeDSD will be able to obtain more of her "back-catalog" recordings from Alpha Classics. In the meantime, get this one!