Juliette Hurel / Hélène Couvert HAYDN Flute Sonatas

 

FLUTE SONATAS

 

Juliette Hurel / Hélène Couvert COMPOSITRICES À L’AUBE DU XXE SIÈCLE

                                       COMPOSITRICES À L’AUBE DU XXE SIÈCLE

Juliette Hurel / Hélène Couvert DEBUSSY - JOLIVET - MESSIAEN - DUTILLEUX - HERSANT - DUSAPIN - TANGUY - VARESE

This is a CD only a flutist could love: It is heavy on the solo repertoire and comprised entirely of “new” music. Juliette Hurel makes obvious choices such as pairing Syrinx and Densité 21.5 as disc openers, both of which she plays well, though the latter could use a little more vehemence, more force. She also closes the disc with three solo offerings, which is a lot of flute-alone for anyone (save for other flutists) to take in a single listening. Pascal Dusapin’s I Pesci is comprised of three short and sweet movements, and Hurel plays all of them beautifully if not a little to carefully–she seems determined to make every solo sound “pretty” rather than exploring the flute’s more dramatic expressive possibilities. Only when it comes to Phillipe Hersant’s Cinq Miniatures, each of whose five movements is intended to evoke a particular kind of non-Western flute style, does she allow her tone to vary.

The three accompanied works are worth a serious listen. Dutilleux’s 1943 Sonatine is delightfully spry and fiendishly difficult, challenges that Hurel and pianist Helene Couvert attack with frothy élan. Perhaps being spurred on a little by a musical cohort draws a less dark, more focused sound from Hurel. She and Couvert make short work of Jolivet’s furious Chant de Linos but fare not so well on Messiaen’s Merle Noir, where the tone of the two players seems mismatched, as if they are working at cross-purposes. The recording is intimate and focused, allowing the flute to sound beautiful but never shrill. (Classics Today)

Juliette Hurel / Hélène Couvert À L'AUBE DU ROMANTISME

Juliette Hurel's 2013 album on Naïve explores pieces for flute and piano by Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert, evoking the period between Classicism and early Romanticism. Perhaps the subtlest work of the program is Beethoven's Flute Sonata in B flat major, WoO A4, written in 1790 and fashioned under the influence of Haydn. Its sunny disposition and light textures are periodically interrupted by unexpected key changes and sudden digressions into the minor, characteristics that anticipate Beethoven's later development and mark it as a transitional work. His Serenade for flute and piano, Op. 41, is an arrangement of the Serenade for flute, violin, and viola, Op. 25, and it has a similar, if sometimes deceptive, air of Classical simplicity, which is all the more apparent because of the brevity of the movements. Only Schubert's Variations on a Theme from Die schöne Müllerin is unequivocally Romantic, and its sudden changes of mood and key make it the most fascinating piece on the disc. Hurel and her accompanist Hélène Couvert play with grace and refinement, and their performances display expressive flexibility and technical control, particularly by balancing the poise and cheerfulness of the Beethoven pieces with the melancholy mood and volatility of Schubert's variations. Naïve's reproduction is clear and bright, with considerable presence. (Blair Sanderson)