Sunday Classics: Flute-and-Harp Week, part 2: Mozart's Concerto for Flute and Harp -- plus two mighty concertante works that bracket it

The first movement (Allegro) of Mozart's Concerto for Flute and Harp is played by flutist Patrick Gallois and harpist Fabrice Pierre, with the Orchestra della Svizzera italiana conducted by Sir Neville Marriner.

by Ken

As I explained in Friday night's part 1 of our Flute-and-Harp Week, this microseries was touched off by our recent hearing of Debussy's late Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp, with its teasing tug into the world of the combination of flute and harp. It's not a combination that drives me wild, but apparently it does it for a lot of music lovers, including a fair number of composers, in particular French ones.

Since this isn't my cup of tea, I've stifled the impulse to launch a dragnet for flute-and-harp repertory. Friday night I offered two works I love which are heavy on the flute-and-harp combination, the Entr'acte to Act III of Bizet's Carmen and the intentionally strange little Trio for Two Flutes and Harp from Berlioz's Childhood of Christ. For today I thought we would do something I don't do much in Sunday Classics: listen to a piece that isn't part of my circle of beloved musical works. I figured that in the process of preparing the audio files and then jiggering them for post positions, I would wind up listening to the piece probably more than I ever have.

As I've tried to make clear (see this May 2010 post), Mozart's piano concertos are among my favorite things in the world -- there are a dozen or more I can fairly say I love, and maybe a half-dozen that are as precious to me as any music I know. I love the violin concertos too (we heard the first movement of the D major, No. 4, this past December), with the love appropriate to the finer achievements of the younger Mozart. The Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola, K. 364, another of my great treasures (see this October 2010 post), was written a mere year after the Flute and Harp Concerto. (But then, so was its noticeably less compelling near-twin, the Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra, K. 365.)

The wind concertos don't figure as prominently in my musical consciousness. I do listen to the four-plus horn concertos a fair amount, but I'm not sure really that I love more than the First. I have a friend who's positively crazy for the early Bassoon Concerto; me, not so much. Even the late Clarinet Concerto -- well, I enjoy it, but it's not a piece I go out of my way to listen to (unlike, say, the unequivocally sublime Clarinet Quintet). The two Flute Concertos (including the one more properly known as an oboe concerto), again fine but no thrill, and ditto for the Flute and Harp Concerto, our sole agenda item for today.

It's hardly a trifle, running anywhere from just under to just over a half-hour, and it's certainly a pretty popular piece. I'm thinking maybe I just haven't listened to it enough, so maybe the brief immersion I'll have while working on this post -- and then futzing with it after it's posted -- will do the trick. In other words, I'm trying to get to know the concerto in much the same way I'm inviting those of you who don't already know it to.

Of course, for those of you who already know the Flute and Harp Concerto, there's the music itself, which I like to think is the point of the whole exercise.


TO LAUNCH OUR EXPLORATION OF MOZART'S
FLUTE AND HARP CONCERTO, CLICK HERE

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