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Contents:
DDD 78:51 - Recorded: St Andrews Church, Toddington, Gloucestershire, UK, 30-31 May 2000 TL The Baroque Recorder in England For
the German flute is an indirect, the common flute good. On 25 May 1660 King Charles II landed at Dover to claim the throne of England. After eleven years of Puritan restraint, the Restoration period was to see a renaissance of artistic endeavour in England, particularly in literature, theatre and music. Although only a small proportion of Charles’s exile was spent in France, he must have been impressed by the musical life at the court of his cousin, King Louis XIV, since on his return he encouraged emulation of the French style among London’s composers: Pelham Humfrey was sent to France to study the latest musical fashions, and on his return was declared by Samuel Pepys to be ‘an absolute Monsieur’ (Diary, November 1667). One of the most important and influential musical developments in France during the second half of the seventeenth century was the experimental change in the design of woodwind instruments by a group of craftsmen working in the village of La Couture-Boussey on the outskirts of Paris. Here the characteristic baroque forms of the recorder, flute, oboe and bassoon were established and the new designs were quickly imitated by instrument makers in England and Germany. Unlike its renaissance predecessor, the typical baroque recorder was made in three sections with bulges at the open sockets for strength and decoration. The small undercut fingerholes, narrow windway and complex bore profile gave the baroque recorder a flexible and reedy tone quality quite unlike that of the older instrument, and ideally suited to solo rather than consort performance. While German makers, notably the Denner family of Nuremburg, developed recorders with a strong and easy high register, French and English instruments usually favoured rich and expressive lower notes. It is surely no coincidence that whereas Bach and Telemann wrote freely for the recorder over its full range of more than two octaves, Purcell and Handel rarely wrote higher than the second octave E flat on the alto instrument. Among surviving instruments thought to be of English origin are recorders bearing the names Bradbury, Foley, Harris and Schuchart, but by far the most prominent makers were Peter Bressan (fl1685-1731), Thomas Stanesby (c1668-1734) and his son, also Thomas (1692-1754). Bressan and his friend the composer Jacques Paisible came to England in the 1680s, possibly to escape the persecution of Huguenots in their native France. It has been suggested that the initials P-I that are stamped on Bressan’s instruments stand for Pierre Jaillard, and that the name Bressan was taken from the maker’s birthplace, Bourg-en-Bresse. The only surviving instruments by Bressan are flutes and recorders, the latter greatly outnumbering the former. Bressan’s recorders closely resembled those of the French makers such as the Hotteterre family, but at a pitch of around A407Hz slightly less than a semitone higher than the French models. Unlike Bressan, the Stanesbys made the complete range of woodwind instruments, including in 1739 a double bassoon for Handel, now in the National Museum in Dublin. Sir John Hawkins, writing some three decades after the recorder had fallen from fashion (A General History of the Science and Practice of Musick, 1776), compared the instruments of Bressan and Stanesby: ‘The flutes of the younger Stanesby approach the nearest of any to perfection, but those of Bressan though excellent in their tone, are all too flat in the upper register.’ It is not known exactly when the baroque recorder first arrived in England, but it is clear that by about 1680 the alto (treble) instrument in F, known as the Common Flute, English flute or, more usually, simply ‘flute’, was being widely played by musical amateurs. Pepys recorded in April 1668 a visit ‘to Drumblebys and there did talk a great deal about pipes, and did buy a recorder which I do intend to learn to play on, the sound of it being of all sounds in the world the most pleasing to me’. The first English instruction book for the recorder aimed at the lucrative amateur market appeared in 1679, written by John Hudgebut and entitled A Vade Mecum for the Lovers of Musick, shewing the Excellency of the Rechorder. A number of similar books appeared over the next few years with such titles as The Pleasant Companion or The Delightful Companion, and all providing valuable insights into style and technique for the modern player. Perhaps more significantly, many of the leading composers of the day including William Croft, John Christopher Pepusch, Daniel Purcell and, of course, George Frideric Handel, contributed to a large repertoire of duets, solo and trio sonatas and other pieces for the recorder. In professional circles the recorder seems to have been regarded primarily as a doubling instrument for the orchestral oboists, and was used by composers sparingly but highly effectively to highlight certain moments in vocal and operatic works. In the court odes and theatre music Henry Purcell used pairs of recorders in pastoral, amorous or supernatural contexts, or simply to illustrate references to ‘flute’ in the text. Handel’s use of the recorder in his operas is no less telling, although the symbolic associations are not so strong. In Rinaldo, his first Italian opera for the London stage, a flauto piccolo (sopranino recorder) is used with a pair of altos to suggest vividly the birdsong referred to in the text. By the middle of the 18th century after what many consider to have been its Golden Age, the recorder had become virtually obsolete. Like the lute and viola da gamba it did not have the dynamic range increasingly demanded by the new galant style of composition and, unlike the transverse flute, oboe and especially the new-fangled clarinet, it could not be developed and mechanised without losing its essential character and charm. Let Hawkins have the last word: 'It may be remembered by many now living that the flute was the pocket companion of many who wished to be thought fine gentlemen. The use of it was to entertain ladies, and such as had a liking for no better music than a song tune, or such little airs as were then composed for that instrument’ (A General History…1776). Alan Davis George Frideric Handel: The Recorder Sonatas The charm of these fascinating and much-loved sonatas derives from Handel’s great variety and inventive use of thematic motifs and harmonic progressions in the sonata da chiesa movements (allegros, andantes and adagios), and his occasional use of sonata da camera movements that were essentially dances. The sources of these pieces, which Terence Best considers as having been composed between 1724 and 1726, reveal a tangled web of autographs consisting of Handel’s incomplete fair copies and first drafts, copies by unidentified copyists, as well as the printed editions of variable authority and questionable legal status that were published by John Walsh in the early eighteenth century. We are lucky to have Handel’s own fair copies of the sonatas in G minor, F major, A minor and C major that exist in a clear legible hand with only few corrections. The primary sources are the autographs in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. However, the first two pages of the C major sonata are missing, and the autograph of the A minor sonata is now in the British Library. The sources for the B flat major and D minor sonatas (also in the Fitzwilliam Museum) appear to be first drafts, being less carefully written and with many corrections. Concerning the D minor sonata, titled Sonata iii a Flauto e Cembalo in one source (private collection), it is not certain whether the Andante and A tempo di menuet movements were intended to be part of this sonata, or whether they were sketches to be included in yet another sonata. Thurston Dart’s 1948 edition of three ‘Fitzwilliam Sonatas’ incorporated these movements into another D minor sonata (No. 2), but most editors have included them as the sixth and seven movements of the established Sonata in D minor. However, there is room for doubt: the five movements in the Fitzwilliam MS seem to be sufficient in themselves in their varied selection of movements of extraordinary contrast and dramatic quality, and it must be admitted that the Andante and A tempo di menuet movements are somewhat of a musical anticlimax when played after the dramatic ending of the Alla breve. As an experiment for this recording, we have relocated these movements earlier in the sonata (tracks 24 and 25), so that the emphatic finality of the Alla breve may not be eclipsed. Five out of the six sonatas were first printed by Walsh in 1730-1. The sonatas in G minor, F major, A minor and C major were printed in their original keys, but the D minor sonata was transposed to B minor for the transverse flute. The B flat major sonata only exists (without title) in the Fitzwilliam Museum MS, and its designation for recorder was deduced by Thurston Dart on grounds of pitch range and appropriate key. Handel himself titled the autograph fair copies of the sonatas in G minor, F major and A minor, ‘Sonata a Flauto e Cembalo’. In the early eighteenth century, the Italian ‘flauto’, the French ‘flűte’ and the English ‘flute’ all signified the recorder, whereas the transverse flute was called ‘flauto traverso’, ‘German flute’ or just ‘traversa’. Also notable is the word ‘cembalo’ (harpsichord) in the title rather than the more normal appellation ‘basso continuo’, implying that a bass stringed instrument to double the harpsichordist’s left hand was perhaps not necessary in these pieces. For this recording we have chosen to take Handel’s title literally, playing them as duos rather than trios. As was customary for a professional composer in the eighteenth century, Handel borrowed and reused many individual movements for his subsequent compositions. From the C major sonata, the second movement was used as the first allegro in the overture to Scipioni (1726), the third movement reappeared in the flute sonata in G major, Opus 1 No. 5, and material from the fifth movement was used in an aria from Allessando (1726), ‘Placa l’alma’. In the A minor sonata, the fourth movement exists in an early version for violin and basso continuo in C minor. Two movements from the G minor sonata appear extensively in other guises: the second and fourth movements appear in the flute sonata in E minor known as Opus 1 No. 1a (c.1728). The third and fourth movements were reworked in the organ concerto, Op. 4 No. 3, whilst the fourth movement was revised as a Gavotte in the organ concerto Op. 7 No. 5. All three movements of the B flat major sonata were utilised for alternative purposes: the first movement appears as the second allegro in Scipioni (1726), the second movement became the second of the organ concerto in F, Op. 4 No. 4 (1735), and the third was used for the third movement of the violin sonata in A major, Op. 1 No. 3 (c. 1726). In one instance, an entire sonata was rescored for orchestra and solo organ: the F major sonata became the organ concerto in F, Opus 4 No. 5, first performed in 1735 and published in 1738. It is also possible that compositional ideas from other works were transformed to create entirely new movements in the recorder sonatas; for example the famous D major hornpipe from the Water Music (1717), when played in the opposite mode, may well have served as the generative motif for the second movement of the D minor recorder sonata. Elsewhere in the same sonata, the fifth movement became the third fugue in Twelve Voluntaries and Fugues for the Organ or Harpsicord . . . Book IV (London, c1780). Handel’s Suite No. 7 in G minor for solo harpsichord, published in 1720, is a combination of dance and sonata movements in which French and Italian styles are powerfully juxtaposed. The Ouverture began its life as an ensemble prelude to Handel’s dramatic cantata Il cor fedele (1707); it is an overture in the French style, beginning with dramatic dotted rhythms and virtuoso tirades, followed by a vigorous fugue on a subject dominated by repeated notes and dotted rhythms. The Italianate Andante and Allegro movements are followed by a French sarabande grave whose notation, I believe, invites further decoration to realise its full effect – the printed notes may well be only a skeleton. The Italian Gigue in 12/8 metre is followed by one of Handel’s most grandiose and virtuosic movements, a French Passacaille, which makes a fitting conclusion to this, the grandest of all his keyboard suites. The reusing and reworking of earlier compositions might seem today to suggest a lack of artistic conviction and integrity, but the concept of composition as a craft, with the composer continually refashioning existing ideas and extending their inherent musical possibilities in accordance with a developing creative imagination, is the hallmark of musical geniuses such as Handel and JS Bach. The miracle of such composers is that the quality of their invention and the organisation and control of large-scale structures is so compelling that the particular medium of performance becomes a secondary consideration to their sheer genius for musical creativity. David Ponsford
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