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Arcadian Murmurs

Label Euterpr Number 202 Composer David Golightly / Various Artist Nina Assimakopoulos Instruments flute Availablity In stock Price: £10.00 including VAT at 17.5% £8.51 shipped outside the European Union

Arcadian Murmurs, subtitled Pan in Pieces is the first volume of Nina Assimakopoulos' eclectic collection of unaccompanied works for flute.

Alongside well-known works by Debussy and Poulenc are many contemporary offerings by composers such as Ary van Leeuwen, Roger Bourdin and David Golightly - a truly international collection of living composers.

The subtitle ("Pan in Pieces") of this selection of works for solo flute fairly sums up the basic idea running throughout the recital:. a varied collection of pieces evoking Pan, in one way or another. It appropriately opens with Debussy’s celebrated Syrinx followed by a very similar short work The Ecstatic Shepherd by the ‘English Debussy’, i.e. Cyril Scott. (Incidentally, Scott’s piece has been recorded by Kenneth Smith several years ago [ASV CD DCA 739].) Ary van Leeuwen was one of the foremost flute virtuosi of his time. He was hired by Mahler and went on to become principal flautist with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra under Sir Eugene Goossens. The challenge of his Pan’s Lament is, so we are told, to give linear coherence to a score that at first sight looks rather like a patchwork of fragmentary ideas. Poulenc’s Le joueur de flûte berce les ruines is a real novelty, though not one to greatly shatter our appreciation of his output. This tiny sketch was composed in 1942 probably as a gift to a friend (we are not told), was lost for many years and consequently never mentioned in any worklist. It surfaced as recently as 1997. The very detailed notes by Bradley Wilber accompanying this release mention that DeLaney’s lovely Hymn to Pan was inspired by Shelley’s eponymous poem. The French composer Roger Bourdin, trained and active as a flautist, is rather better-known for short idiomatic pieces for flute, of which Chanson de Pan and Pan blessé are – I think – good examples. These pieces may be fairly well-known by flautists, but less so by music lovers, so that their inclusion here is most welcome.

Hubert Culot

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