Debussy, Poulenc, Jolivet – Urszula Janik

There is a particular loneliness to the unaccompanied flute — no harmonic cushion, no pedal to hide behind, just breath and column of air and whatever intonation you can manage on your own. Debussy knew this when he wrote Syrinx for Louis Fleury back in 1913, originally as incidental music for a play about Pan that nobody remembers anymore. The piece has outlived its occasion by more than a century now, partly because it distills something essential about French flute writing: sensuous, unhurried, faintly erotic in that fin-de-siècle way, all chromatic slither and never quite landing where you expect.

Urszula Janik opens her new recital with it, and plays it beautifully — dusky in the low register, the kind of tone that seems to come from just behind the teeth rather than the diaphragm. She’s the principal flute of the Warsaw Philharmonic, and you can hear an orchestral player’s discipline in the phrasing: nothing indulgent, nothing smeared. Some flutists turn Syrinx into two minutes of aimless sighing. Janik gives it shape.

The three unaccompanied works on this disc — the Debussy, Ferroud’s Trois Pièces, and the closing Messiaen — are, not coincidentally, where the engineering is most successful. Recorded without a partner to balance against, Janik’s flute fills the space properly, every key-click and breath audible without becoming intrusive. Flute recordings are notoriously easy to botch, all hiss and glare. This one isn’t.

Would that the balance held up once pianist Joanna Kaczmarska-Biezynska enters the picture. In the duo repertoire — Poulenc’s sonata, Jolivet’s Chant de Linos, the arrangement of the Debussy — the flute sits back in the sound picture, slightly recessed, as though Janik had taken two steps away from the microphone the moment the pianist sat down. It’s not fatal. But it does mean some of the sonic bloom that makes the solo tracks so vivid gets thinned out just when you want more of it, not less.

The Gustav Samazeuilh transcription of the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune is the disc’s most interesting gamble, and its most compromised. Samazeuilh — a minor composer himself, a friend of Debussy and Ravel and Chausson, the sort of cultivated Parisian dilettante the era produced in abundance — made this piano reduction with real skill. But no piano, however sensitively played, replicates that opening flute solo answered by muted horns, those divided strings, that harp glissando that seems to dissolve the whole texture into vapor. Janik plays the famous line gorgeously, all languor and slow vibrato. Ten minutes of piano standing in for an orchestra is a long stretch, though, and Kaczmarska-Biezynska, however game, cannot make a Steinway sound like Debussy’s shimmering pit band. This was probably inevitable. Doesn’t make it not a loss.

Better luck with the actual chamber repertoire, where these composers wrote idiomatically rather than adapted after the fact. Ibert’s Pièce, tossed off in 1936, is a charming trifle — five minutes of Gallic wit that never overstays its welcome, and Janik plays it exactly that way, lightly, without fuss. Ferroud’s Trois Pièces, less often heard (Ferroud died in a car accident in Hungary at thirty-six, one of French music’s genuine what-ifs), gets a persuasive advocacy here: spiky, neoclassical, owing something to Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat without merely copying it.

The Poulenc sonata is, as it always is, the emotional center of gravity. Written near the end of his life for Jean-Pierre Rampal, commissioned by the Coolidge Foundation in memory of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, it carries that Poulenc signature of melancholy dressed up as charm. The slow movement in particular has an ache to it that the composer — moine et voyou, as he called himself, monk and rascal — rarely allowed to surface so nakedly. Janik and Kaczmarska-Biezynska play it with real feeling, unforced rubato, the pianist especially alert to the harmonic shadows Poulenc drops into what sounds, on the surface, like salon music. This is the track I’d play for someone who claims not to like twentieth-century French repertoire.

Jolivet’s Chant de Linos asks for a different kind of virtuosity altogether — extended technique, wide leaps, a kind of ecstatic wildness suggesting its origin as a competition piece for the Paris Conservatoire. Janik, who has already proven her contemporary-music credentials on a Naxos disc of Penderecki’s Fonogrammi, has no difficulty with its technical demands. What’s more impressive is that she doesn’t let virtuosity curdle into mere display. There’s shape and narrative to it, a sense of the piece’s mourning-into-frenzy trajectory — Linos being the mythical inventor of melody, killed, depending on which version you believe, by Apollo or by Heracles.

Messiaen’s “Le Merle Noir” closes the program, and rightly so — it’s the disc’s most purely enjoyable oddity, the blackbird’s song transcribed with the composer’s characteristic ornithological literalism and then set loose in a