Paris, La Belle Époque
Robert Langevin (flute)
Margaret Kampmeier (piano)
rec. 2012, Manhattan School of Music, New York, USA
Bridge 9555 [77]

On first hearing, this disc was a delight from beginning to end. Further hearings were even more rewarding.

Canadian flautist Robert Langevin was born in Quebec. He studied for several years at the Montreal Conservatory. Then, in 1976, he was awarded Canada’s Prix d’Europe, which enabled him to study with Aurèle Nicolet at the Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg and subsequently with Maxence Larrieu in Geneva. During his time in Europe, he was also able to attend classes with James Galway in England.

After his return to North America he has been, at various times, Principal Flautist of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and, since 2000, Solo Flautist with the New York Philharmonic.

Throughout this disc Langevin plays with perfect (but not pedantic) control and precision; his intonation is faultless and so is his judgement as regards phrasing and the use of vibrato. His collaborator is pianist Margaret Kampmeier, an important figure in American music both as a performer and as a teacher. Some readers may be familiar with the excellence of her work on such recordings as K.K. Sorabji, Complete Songs for Soprano and Piano, with Elizabeth Farnum (Centaur CRC 2613) and American Tapestry: Duos for Flute and Piano, with Susan Rotholz (Bridge 9411). She currently teaches in the Department of Music at Princeton and is Chair and Director of the Contemporary Performance Program at the Manhattan School of Music.

Langevin and Kampmeier complement one another ideally throughout the fascinating programme on this disc – a programme which blends familiar names (such as Debussy and Fauré) with one or two (like Mouquet) who are in danger of being forgotten or (like Widor) are not normally associated with intimate chamber music.

I have to confess that my acquaintance with Widor’s music has rarely gone beyond his works for organ, though I have heard choral works such as Surrexit a mortuis and Da Pacem. Many years ago, while teaching at a Shakespeare summer school in Cambridge, I heard a student performance of his Cello concerto. But none of these really prepared me for the quiet inventiveness and beauty of his Suite for Flute and Piano. Its four movements (Moderato – Scherzo, Allegro vivace – Romance, Andantino – Final, Vivace) are full of attractive melodies for the flute, of which Robert Langevin makes the most, without being self-indulgent. Nowhere does interest flag and I was left feeling that this work ought to be better known. That feeling led me to listen to some other recordings (as, for example, by Top of Form).

Odinn Baldvinsson and Patricia Romero (Divine Art DDA25126), James Galway and Christopher O’Riley (RCA, 09026683512) and Emmanuel Pahud with Eric Le Sage (Warner Classics 5578132). None of these performances is weak or unsatisfactory, but I preferred Langevin and Kampmeier to all of them. Here, and elsewhere in this programme, they display the happy knack of finding and then sustaining the magic moment in which fluidity of phrasing and melody are reconciled with the demands of formal structure.

Less well-known than Widor, Jules Mouquet is represented by what is, so far as I know, the only one of his works which has been played with considerable regularity ever since its composition around 1904, La flûte de Pan. This was originally published as Sonate pour flûte e piano: La flûte de Pan. It is in three movements – ‘Pan et les bergers’ (Allegro), ‘Pan et les oiseaux’ (Adagio),and ‘Pan et les nymphes’ (Allegro molto vivo). In the score, each movement is prefaced by a French translation of a short passage from an Ancient Greek author, the first by lines from the poet Alcaeus, the second by lines from the female poet Anyté of Tegea and the last by a passage from Plato. The passages serve both as a guide to the interpreters of the work and to stimulate the imagination of the listener who takes the trouble to consult the score. La flûte de Pan was dedicated to Léopold Lafleurance (1865-1953), a significant figure in the French tradition of the flute. Mouquet would have known him at the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied at much the same time as Mouquet and later became Professor of Flute from 1914-1919 (Mouquet was appointed Professor of Harmony at the Conservatoire in 1913). La flûte de Pan has often featured in recitals by flautists, whether in the concert hall or the recording studio. There also exist at least two arrangements for flute and orchestra, but the original is surely preferable to either of them, with its greater sense of intimacy.

The music is by turns wistful and mildly pictorial, while never being less than charming and elegant – virtues which find no room for the presentation of the dangers the violent Pan posed (not for nothing is his name the source of the word ‘panic’) or his activities as a sexual predator: see, for example, Rubens’ painting ‘Pan and Syrinx’ in the Royal Collection. The second movement is particularly beautiful; a largely reflective Pan, without human ‘company’, establishes a dialogue with the birds. This reading of the piece by Robert Langevin and Margaret Kampmeier is the loveliest and most perceptive performance of this work I can remember – or, indeed, imagine hearing.

Langevin and Kampmeier also give us an equally impressive performance of Fauré’s ‘Fantaisie’. Fauré composed the ‘Fantaisie’ to a commission from the great flautist Paul Taffanel, for use in the ‘Concours de flûte’, the annual competition of Taffanel’s students at the Paris Conservatoire. It is in two short movements – the first marked Andantino, the second Allegro. Langevin and Kampmeier bring out all the subtle beauty (not least harmonically) of the first movement, in the long phrases of which Robert Langevin’s breath control is exemplary. But Langevin’s concern never seems to be to demonstrate what a technically assured musician he is; he wants, rather, to show us how subtly refined Fauré’s music is. Langevin’s performance brings out delightfully, and without any sense of sentimentality, the lyricism of Fauré’s writing for the flute and he gets excellent support from Margaret Kampmeier. A performance as good as this makes it easy to understand why the ‘Fantaisie’ has entirely transcended its origins as a ‘test’ piece and become, in the words of Eileen Gilligan, “a firm part of the flute repertoire”.

Debussy’s superb Syrinx for unaccompanied flute was written, at the author’s request, for use as incidental music (played off-stage) in a poetic drama (Psyché) by Debussy’s friend Gabriel Mourey, a poet and dramatist associated with the Symbolists. With its ambiguous harmonies and its frequent changes of rhythm, a good performance of Syrinx (such as this by Robert Langevin) sounds almost like the work of an accomplished improvisor. Though brief (around three minutes in performance) the work has been very influential, becoming one of the (perhaps the) most important model and inspiration for many later works written for unaccompanied flute. Morey wanted Debussy to write music which would evoke the emotions and thoughts of Pan as he becomes aware of the closeness of his death. The result is a stunningly beautiful meditation on love and death. The dynamic range is quite narrow and the work as a whole has a sense of restraint, hinting at grand gestures not made. In harmonic terms it moves away from conventional chromaticism towards the use of pentatonic modes which are reminiscent both of oriental music and of some early Church music. When the work was posthumously prepared for publication by Jean Joubert the title was changed to Syrinx, (from Debussy’s ‘La flûte de Pan’), to avoid confusion with another work by Debussy, contained in his Chansons de Bilitis. Langevin reacts creatively to the many changes of tempo marked in the score, never being merely pedantic or stiff in his response to these marking, while never ignoring them either. He captures very well the air of compulsive repetition in the central section of Syrinx, as if Pan is struggling to face up to the inevitability of his death. In the closing section, from around bar 22, the music registers the moments of Pan’s death, repeating the theme which began Syrinx, but at an octave lower, before the work lapses into silence. Langevin articulates all this very beautifully. The grateful Gabriel Mourey said of the piece that it was “a real jewel of restrained emotion, of sadness … of discrete tenderness and poetry”, a description on which I cannot improve.

I have concentrated my remarks on these four works by Debussy, Fauré, Widor and Mouquet because I regard them as the finest works on the disc. However, this should not be taken as implying that the remaining works on the disc are unimportant or trivial. This is far from being the case and the performers give fully committed and perceptive performances of every piece on their programme. Enescu’s ‘Cantabile e presto’ draws some superb playing from Langevin (some of the triple-tongued passages are remarkable) and Kampmeier is (as throughout the disc) an alert, sensitive and supportive accompanist. Philippe Gaubert was himself a flautist; his ‘Madrigal’ certainly evidences his understanding of the instrument, and Langevin revels in the grace with which the writing deploys the resources of the flute.

After the painful defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) and the miseries of the Paris Commune (1871), Paris saw a remarkable civic and cultural rebirth during the Belle Époque period, which was only interrupted by the First World War. This richly enjoyable and rewarding disc vividly illustrates some contributions music made to this revival and renewal of French culture.

Glyn Pursglove

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Contents:
Charles-Marie Widor (1844-1937)
Suite, Op 34 [1877]
Jules Mouquet (1867-1947)
La flûte de Pan (Sonata for flute and piano), Op 15 (1904)
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)
Fantaisie, Op 79 (1898)
Georges Enescu (1881-1955)
Cantabile e presto (1904)
Philippe Gaubert (1879-1941)
Nocturne et allegro scherzando (1906)
Fantaisie (1912)
Madrigal (1908)
Gabriel Fauré
Morceau de concours (1898)
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Prelude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894), arrangement for flute and piano (1925) by Gustave Samazeuilh (1877-1967)
Syrinx (1913)