Arthur Lourié (1891-1966)
Chamber and Instrumental Music – Volume 1
Sunrise, for flute solo (1957)
Pastorale de la Volga, for oboe, bassoon, two violas and cello (1916)
Regina Coeli, for contralto, oboe and trumpet (1924)
La Flûte à travers le Violon, for flute and violin (1935)
Dithyrambes, for flute solo (1938)
Deux Études sur un sonnet de Mallarmé (1945–62); No. 1 Phrases, for flute and piano
The Mime, for clarinet solo (1956)
The Flute of Pan, for flute solo (1957)
Funeral Games in Honour of Chronos, for three flutes, piano and cymbals (1964)
rec. 2021/22, Sacro Cuore Church, Bellinzona, Switzerland and Studio 1, Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen, Zurich
Texts included
TOCCATA CLASSICS TOCC0652 [70]
Toccata’s blurb writer has no need to delve into historical minutiae when describing the remarkable life and career of Arthur Lourié; ‘student of Glazunov, friend of Blok, lover of Akhmatova, commissar of the Soviet regime, an exile in Germany, France and the USA, ghost writer for Koussevitzky…’ Where to start?
Well, where better than with the music in this first volume (of two) of his chamber and instrumental music series which traces him from 1916 to 1964, a couple of years before his death. This allows a slant on his compositional processes and fascinations over a major period of time. The disc actually breaks the logic of the chronological direction of his music only with the first track, Sunrise, for solo flute composed in 1957, which also succeeds in breaking up a run of flute works in 1956-57. Sunrise is a brief piece, full of roulades of expressive colour. We’re immediately then pitched back to 1916 and the Pastorale de la Volga, intriguingly written for the unlikely combination of oboe, bassoon, two violas and cello. This is a piece drenched in folkloric influence in which the theme is accompanied by constantly varied figures – eventful music that soon generates heat, including a soliloquy for the bassoon and much colouristic imagination.
Another oddity is Regina Coeli, for contralto, oboe and trumpet (1924), a piece that lasts barely three minutes. The fanfare figure which starts the piece is arresting and subtly conceived, and Lourié varies the instruments’ punctuating lines with some legerdemain – legato and staccato according to the music’s demands. He clearly had an enthusiasm for blending two instrumental voices, as he shows again in the sinuous and elegantly neo-classical exchanges in La Flûte à travers le Violon, the Stravinskian influence of which is explained by the close friendship between the two men.
The instrumental voice that seems predominantly to have impressed him remained, however, the flute and it’s noticeable that in La Flûte à travers le Violon the melody line is taken by the flute, the violin scudding across it. Dithyrambes is for flute solo, a three-movement piece with evocative titles – Le Sacrifice du miel is the title of the first movement, for instance. The soloist sets up a kind of call-and-response set of figures, lines rising and falling but by the finale (Labyrinthe) the music has turned extrovert and catchy with a playful examination of upper and lower voicings.
Deux Études sur un sonnet de Mallarmé is represented by the first, Phrases, for flute and piano, a fresh and graceful little piece where the piano proves lyrically supportive. Around this time – this time being the mid-50s – Lourié met Charlie Chaplin and wrote The Mime for solo clarinet which was dedicated to Chaplin. Conjecturally it’s a kind of character sketch, though it is somewhat anodyne, at least to me. He couldn’t let go of his beloved flute though and the following year wrote The Flute of Pan inwhich one can find some flutter-tonguing, an unusual device for Lourié.
He also saw the flute as capable of embodying and transmitting sculptural, antique and ritualised elements, which you can hear in the last piece in the programme, Funeral Games in Honour of Chronos, for three flutes, piano and cymbals. Lourié didn’t really go in for developing his ideas as such – thematic development isn’t much in evidence in this disc – but what he preferred was a specific sense of atmosphere, or the essence of suggestibility that his instrumental conjunctions and solo works evoked. The striking conjunctions and sonorities of Funeral Games is a case in point, moving from athletic declamation to chant-like and the essence of the funereal toward the end. Perhaps he was summing up elements of his own life, ritualised and transformed.
The personnel is spearheaded by flautist Birgit Ramsl and they all play with commendable accomplishment and verve that serve Lourié well. There are also four premiere recordings. However you sum him up, stylistically, his remains a cultured, cultivated and agreeably cosmopolitan voice, drawing on Russian and French traditions to irradiate the ritual formality of his music.
Jonathan Woolf
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Performers
Birgit Ramsl (flute)
Raphael Leone (piccolo)
Paolo Beltramini (clarinet)
Candy Grace Ho (contralto)
Gottlieb Wallisch (piano)
Egidius Streiff (viola, violin)
Musicians of the Arthur Lourié Festival, Basel: Lucie Brotbek Prochásková (alto flute): Hansjürgen Wäldele (oboe): Nicolas Rihs (bassoon): Simon Lilly (trumpet): Nicolas Suter (percussion): Agnès Mauri (viola): Mateusz Paweł Kamiński (cello)
