"I can’t believe it’s already been some eight years since I first beame acquainted with Maria Cecilia Muñoz, highly talented flutist from the Argentine, in her much lauded album of flute concertos by Mozart and CPE Bach. She has evidentlly traveled far and learned much in the intervening years, as she is quick to demonstrate in her new album with pianist Tiffany Butt, Libertad, subtitled “The Will to freedom.”
Native Parisienne Mélanie Bonis (1858-1937), a highly prolific composer, is heard from first in Pièce, pour flûte et piano op. 189, and Une flûte soupire, in the latter of which the composer effectively utilizes the “sighing” affect hinted-at in the title. Getting the program off to a good start, it is followed by The Bird Fancyer’s New Delight (2023) by our contemporary David Braid, the only composer possessing both X and Y chromosomes in a program dominated by the ladies. The five pieces include a wicked “Clock-Caged Canary,” “Canary,” ”Woodlark Dogfight,” “Trosill's Wing,” and “Country Linnett,” sketches that can be occasionally satirical as well as descriptive.
Up next, Clara Schumann (1819-1896) needs no introduction. Her Drei Romanzen for violin and piano, Op. 22 start off quietly with an Andante Molto characterized by sensational trills and a cool, refreshing interlude. The other movements are a contrasted pair: a lively Allegretto and one entitled Leidenschaftlich Schnell, which true to its title proves, by turns, both sorrowfully laden and quick.
Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina (b.1931), up next, is heard from in her Allegro Rustico, a jazzy and jaunty work that impresses the listener right from the outset with its frantically warbling, burnished trills and pulse-quickening pacing. It requires, and receives, the utmost in close collaboration between artists Maria Cecilia Muñoz and Tiffany Butt.
Next, we have a superb setting for flute and piano by our present artists of the Sonata in A minor for Violin and Piano, Op. 34 by Amy Beach (1867-1944). This american composer whose music has been getting a lot of attention from musical scholars and audiences alike in recent decades, shows a masterful hand in a harmonically rich and beautifully laid-out work in four movements: an opening Allegro Moderato that trails off superbly at the end, a devil-may-care Scherzo with a movingly subdued middle section and a Molto Vivace closing, a Largo con dolore that creates a quiet space all its own, and a finale marked Allegro con fuoco (“with fire”) that is beautifully paced and executed by our present artists all to the way to its end. [This work is currently getting around. For a review of the original Sonata for Violin and Piano, readers are referred to Phil’s Classical Reviews for October, 2023]
The recital ends on an appropriately sombre note with Tffany Butt’s own setting for flute and piano of Lied: Ich wandre durch Theresienstadt by Ilse Weber, Jewish poet and songwriter who died in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. It unfolds in a single movement, subdued in mood and characterized, following a frantic opening, by its deliberately slow progress,
ending quietly in an extended reverie and on the simplest of note progressions. At the end of a recital marked by much fire and virtuosic brilliance, we are left by our artists in a markedly different mood at the very end:
“Theresienstadt, Theresienstadt, just when will the suffering have an end, when will we be free again?”"
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