An Uneven Album of Flute Chamber Music

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of A440 Arts)

This coming Friday the Bright Shiny Things label will release Vent, an album of chamber music for flute (Catherine Gregory) and piano (David Kaplan), which happens to be performed by a married couple. As tends to be the usual case, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders. The album marks the recording debut of both of the performers. In addition, two of the selections are be world premiere performances: the single-movement “Steady Gaze” by Timo Andres and a five-movement suite of Andean Improvisations by Gabriela Lena Frank.

Regular readers probably know by now that I have had a long-standing interest in Frank’s music. Most recently, this involved a deep-dive into her partnership with Nilo Cruz, which resulted in the libretto for her opera El último sueño de Frida y Diego (the last dream of Frida [Kahlo] and Diego [Rivera]). Readers probably know that this opera was given its premiere in San Francisco this past June, when it was added to the repertoire of the San Francisco Opera.

Frank herself was born in Berkeley to an American father of Lithuanian Jewish heritage and a Peruvian mother of Chinese descent. On this new album she departs from her interest in the Mexican heritage of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, turning to the Andes of her mother’s heritage. There is a refreshing diversity across the movements of her Andean Improvisations suite that reflects on that heritage without belaboring any clichéd gestures.

“Steady Gaze,” on the other hand, was composed as a wedding gift. One can imagine how the married couple joined forces to develop an expressive account of Andres’ music. Nevertheless, I have found it difficult to warm up to this composition, which comes across as more than a bit shallow in the wake of Frank’s suite. On the other hand I can still credit Andres with at least some of his imaginative turns, which is more than I can say about the album’s opening track, David Lang’s “Vent.” If Andres can get under my skin when he starts to get tedious, Lang simply drives me up the wall.

In that context I would say that the listener is likely to appreciate that the remaining two compositions on the album are drawn from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively. “Vent” is followed by Franz Schubert’s D. 802, a set of variations (with an extended Introduction), based on the theme of his “Trockne Blumen”, the eighteenth of the twenty songs in his D. 795 Die schöne Müllerin (the fair maid of the mill) cycle. This is a late composition, which is seldom performed in recital; so its appearance on this album is most welcome. Equally satisfying is the performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 94 flute sonata in D major, which tends to be encountered more often in the Opus 94a version for violin and piano.

As a result, the bookkeeper in me comes away satisfied that the assets outnumber the liabilities. Both of the performers are more than adept at teasing out the many corners of expressiveness in most of the selections on this album. Here’s hoping that they will release another album through which I can become better acquainted with the repertoire for flute and piano.