Naxos’ recent issue of Mozart flute concertos featuring Patrick Gallois (type Q7136 in Search Reviews) represents a well-nigh unbeatable bargain, but then so does this new release, offered at an enticing budget price along with a BIS catalog. Of the two soloists, Sharon Bezaly has a slight edge, with her warm, liquid tone and impressive lack of breathiness. She’s quite perky in the quick movements, but really comes into her own with gorgeous phrasing in the slower music. The central Adagio of the G major concerto is particularly exquisite. The cadenzas, written for her by Finnish composer Kalevi Aho, whose marvelous new flute concerto Bezaly also recorded for BIS, add unusual interest to these performances. They are aptly short, clearly based on Mozart’s material, and not at all disrespectful, yet at the same time they are more virtuosic and harmonically adventurous than anything from Mozart’s own time. Usually this sort of thing sounds dreadful–consider Schnittke’s cadenzas for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, for example; but here it works quite well, perhaps because the music isn’t Mozart’s absolute best and so benefits from a little foreign spice here and there. Besides, Bezaly plays all of the cadenzas beautifully.
Strictly speaking, this release is complementary to, rather than competitive with, the Naxos issue. First of all, the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra eschews the use of harpsichord continuo, a good thing in my opinion, though its presence on the Gallois recording is very well-judged and, unusually, strikes a positive note on the whole. In addition, Gallois offers the Concerto for Flute and Harp, while Bezaly plays the two singleton movements that Mozart wrote for solo flute and orchestra. In both cases the accompaniments are excellent, with perhaps the slight edge in rhythmic precision going to Gallois and crew, and this newcomer holding a small advantage in terms of engineering and natural balances between solo and orchestra (especially in multichannel format).
Happily, at this special price, you can have both discs with no financial pain at all, and that will give you everything that Mozart wrote for flute and orchestra, with the major works in performances individual enough to justify the duplication. And then, unless you are a terminal flute junkie, you need never worry about another recording of this music again as long as the universe exists!
