Alexis Kossenko, Valeria Kafelnikov & Stephan MacLeod - Mozart: Concertos for flute and orchestra (2022)

×

Alexis Kossenko, Valeria Kafelnikov & Stephan MacLeod - Mozart: Concertos for flute and orchestra (2022)

Close

If Mozart gave the concerto of his time its ultimate shape, it is because he transferred to it all the characteristics of the opera aria, giving the cantabile – which he often mentions in his correspondence – most significant importance and transforming the vocal virtuosic runs instrumental figurations. The soloist is a character whose rhetoric gives the orchestral material presented in the introduction a deeper, more intimate and more sensitive dimension. This constitutes the raison d’être of the relationship between the individual and the group, between the solos and the tuttis.

Mozart always had in mind the musician for whom the work was written, whether it was an aria or a concerto. He then tailored a suit to measure, as he said (in his piano concertos, he referred to himself, hence the depth and complexity of what is expressed in these works). For a soloist with a virtuoso technique, he would compose highly challenging passages; for someone less assured, he would deliver a more accessible score. Therefore, the last of the four horn concertos written for the famous Joseph Leutgeb is far less demanding than the previous ones since the ageing soloist could no longer play the highest notes. Similarly, the flute part of the Flute and Harp Concerto uses the low notes that were the uniqueness of the instrument used by the Count of Guînes, who commissioned the piece (the notes D flat and C, now found on modern flutes).

The superiority of Mozart’s concertos over those of his contemporaries, including Haydn, lies in the subtle combination of the form’s rigidity and the dramatisation of the musical discourse. Mozart had already experimented with this in the opera seria arias and managed to create tensions and progressions within a static form. Therefore, he did not try to innovate at a formal: his concertos are mostly built on the same pattern. But their content is very rich, and this richness grows according to its development. It largely stems from the composer’s melodic genius, which allowed him to link several characteristic ideas in an organic continuity as if each one flowed from the previous one. It is also due to the fact that the orchestra does not merely accompany the soloist but fully participates in the construction of the musical discourse.

Playing Mozart’s concertos poses the same problem for a flutist as Bach’s sonatas and partitas do for a violinist or his suites for a cellist. This problem is encountered with masterpieces that entered our repertoire too early; when we are confronted with the admirable before the ordinary or when we are taught the exception before the rule. How can we find the distance that will allow us to offer a personal reading? How can we take an objective look at what is already familiar? How can we judge and appreciate as an adult what we have been fed since our earliest childhood? How can we question the precepts taught us in our early years of study? How, finally, to escape from the prison of tradition?

I have never been driven by the desire to do something different at all costs, but by the desire to understand what the work has to tell us. And it is not so easy to reach a stage of lucidity with the “pillars of the repertoire”. Sometimes you have to turn your back on them for a while to rediscover them with fresh eyes, with a virgin heart, to see and feel them as they are and not as we have been taught to consider them. For a long time, I loved Mozart and considered him a genius, simply because I had been taught to love him and consider him as such! Then one day, something clicked; a sudden awareness, lived and felt, of the uniqueness of his genius; a love that has only grown, and above all a sudden discovery of the dramatic potential of his music, not in any way limited to his operas. Each of his works is in fact an opera in miniature, a theater of the soul, and his flute concertos are no exception. This is the angle from which we have approached them, with their share of intrigues, feelings, comic moments, and coups de théâtre! And, much more than the performance of a soloist with orchestral accompaniment, we wanted to bring to light a compelling dialogue, between an operatic character who would be the soloist and an orchestra that is both a setting and an actor, sometimes playing a single character, sometimes a crowd.