{Table} Suite Modale ................................ Bloch
Capricorn ................................... Urs Leimgruber
The Quare Hawk .............................. Frank Corcoran
Flute Sonata ................................ Hindemith
Piccolo Play ................................ Thea Musgrave
Air dans l'aube ............................. Peter Wettstein
(t)air(e) ................................... Heinz Holliger
Ballade ..................................... Frank Martin {/Table} MONDAY'S flute and piano recital by Susan Glaser and Robert Markham, given at the John Field Room, was presented under the auspices of the Swiss Embassy.
Five of the eight composers represented on the programme were Swiss. Works by the best known among them, Ernest Bloch's pastoral sounding Suite Modale (written for flute and strings in 1956) and Frank Martin's typically well crafted test piece for the 1939 international music competition at Geneva, were chosen to open and close the evening.
The other Swiss pieces, all for solo flute, were composed within the last 15 years or so. Urs Leimgruber's Capricorn and Peter Wettstein's Air dans l'aube traverse some of the more familiar paths of contemporary solo flute writing.
Heinz Holliger is renowned as one of the world's leading oboists. But this rounded musician composes, too, and his punningly titled, Holderlin inspired (t)air(e) "taire" in French, means to be silent evidenced clearly his penchant for exploring new sound producing techniques. The remaining solo work, Irish composer Frank Corcoran's dearly The Quare Hawk, takes a typically oblique slant on the age old flute/bird relationship.
The real novelty of the evening was Scottish composer Thea Musgrave's Piccolo Play, concert suite of mainly light character pieces for piccolo and piano written in homage to Couperin. In the suite's softer passages, Susan Glaser was quite successful in capturing a sort of introversion which one wouldn't normally associate with the piccolo, though the instrument's familiar, piercing quality elsewhere became quite painful in the confines of the John field Room.
Her playing throughout the evening was technically resourceful I particularly enjoyed the glowing low register display in Wettstein's Air dans l'aube but not always finely discriminating in matters of musical style. The assertive manner of her pianist (a finalist at the last Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow) limited the rewards of the pieces for duo, where his contributions, inappropriately, seemed more soloistic than partnerly.
