Flute Concertos – Thomas Jensen

Some flute concerto recitals feel like duty programs, assembled to prove range rather than illuminate anything. This one doesn’t, even though it wanders across four sensibilities and three vintages of European taste, from Copenhagen brine to Left Bank perfume.

Start with the Nielsen, because everyone will. The Flute Concerto is one of the strangest and most lovable pieces in the twentieth-century wind repertoire, music that keeps trying to be genial and keeps getting interrupted by its own orchestra, particularly that impertinent trombone who barges into the proceedings like an uninvited relative at dinner. Thomas Jensen plays with a cool, silvery tone, not the buttery roundness some flutists favor, and it suits Nielsen’s astringency. Giordano Bellincampi lets the first movement breathe a bit wider than the standard timing suggests it should. This is not a quick, nervous reading, and the extra room pays off in the woodwind interplay, which has real bite and specificity rather than blur.

Does it topple Patrick Gallois on BIS? No. Gallois remains the benchmark: liquid craft, uncanny control of the concerto’s sudden mood swings, a sense of the music’s oddball comedy that few others catch. But the South Jutland players bring something Gallois’s more polished Danish forces sometimes smooth over: a rawness, an unglamorous directness of orchestral color that feels true to Nielsen’s own orchestration, which is often deliberately ungainly, almost heckling the soloist. That trombone slide in the second movement, you’ll hear it coming and it will still get you. Loosen your collar first.

The Griffes Poem is the discovery here, or ought to be. Griffes died at thirty-five, influenza complicated by pleurisy, just as American music was starting to notice him. A real loss, not a footnote loss. This is a score soaked in Debussy and Ravel, yes, but also in something darker, more brooding, that has nothing to do with French elegance at all. The reading leans hard into that darkness. The strings dig into their lines with an almost Shostakovich-like weight, more Leningrad than Left Bank, and it’s a legitimate interpretive choice even if some listeners will want more perfume and less gravity. I found it persuasive. Griffes was an American who never went to Paris, absorbed its idiom secondhand through scores and imagination, and there’s always been something slightly overcast about his impressionism. This reading understands that instinctively.

Frank Martin’s Ballade, that curious hybrid for flute, strings, and piano, gets a lucid, unfussy account. Martin wrote versions of this piece for nearly every instrument imaginable, a kind of contest showpiece he kept recycling, and it can sound like an exercise in the wrong hands. Here it doesn’t. The piano part, often reduced to accompanimental filler, actually converses with the flute rather than trailing behind it.

Ibert’s Concerto closes things out with Gallic wit and considerable technical hazard. The finale is a moto perpetuo that has embarrassed more than a few virtuosos in concert. Jensen navigates it cleanly, though without quite the effervescence of, say, Emmanuel Pahud at his most puckish. The articulation is crisp; the personality is slightly more reserved than the notes seem to want.

Sonically, this is a demonstration disc, Danacord’s first SACD venture, and you can hear the engineers’ care in every bar. Nielsen’s brutal orchestral tuttis are captured with enough transparency that the flute never entirely vanishes, even when the composer clearly intended a moment of near-drowning. The balance is a genuine achievement, not just a technical one.

Not a first choice across the board. Gallois still owns the Nielsen, and there are more idiomatic Iberts out there. But this is a genuinely interesting, well-engineered anthology with real interpretive ideas behind it, particularly in the Griffes. Worth hearing. Worth owning, even, if the coupling appeals.