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Rating: Can a musician who doesn't love an instrument compose the best concerts ever written for that instrument? Of course, as long as the musician's name is Mozart. We're talking about an "alien" who wrote music with the ease and speed with which "normal" people take notes, at any occasion: often in a carriage, but for example also during a billiard game, and it seems that the delightful trio "Kegelstatt" (K 498), written for the unusual ensemble of clarinet, viola, and piano, was born just like that, from notes taken "live" on a scrap of paper, inspired by the trajectories and collisions of balls on the green table. No wonder then that a couple of assignments taken almost reluctantly, because one had to eat after all, gave rise to equally prodigious marvels of balance and refinement. Yet listening to these concerts, as well as the sublime Quartets for flute and strings, always leaves the doubt that Mozart's biographers, regarding his aversion to the flute, have made a huge blunder.
The twenty-two-year-old former child prodigy who in 1778 was wandering across half of Europe in search of contacts with musical environments a little more open than that of Salzburg was a relatively carefree Mozart, still far from the pre-romantic disturbances that would make his last concerts and symphonies unique and immortal, not to mention the Requiem. In Mannheim, a city with an orchestra with which he had excellent relations, he received from a certain De Jean, an amateur Dutchman, the task of composing two flute concerts. For the second one (K 314), he managed by "recycling" a pre-existing oboe concerto (K 285), just for a change delightfully simple. For the first one, instead, he set to work without sparing energy or phosphorus, and in a short time, he pulled out the ambitious Concerto for Flute in G Major K 313, overflowing with ideas compared to its original function as simple entertainment music, that famous "music for countesses" that Mozart abhorred. From the start, the concerto reveals an expressiveness that brings it closer, if not to the best piano concerts, at least to those for the violin, less intense but formally perfect.
In the initial Allegro maestoso, there is a playful exchange between the flute, which, due to its natural agility, tends to flutter and get lost in territories far from the initial theme, and the orchestra, which with peremptory and vaguely "serious" entries often brings it back on the right path. As often happens in Mozart's concerts, it's the middle movement (Adagio ma non troppo) that is the most engaging. The serene dialogue between flute and orchestra, the exposition of a great number of motifs, the progressive transition from an idyllic mood to a distinctly more elegiac one, the timid and sweet hints of phrases embedded among the main motifs, make this movement a little gem, at least for today's listeners. Instead, the flautist to whom it was intended was forced to admit that it was too much grace for his limited means and had a substitute Andante prepared at record speed, a bit simpler (K 315, present on the record) which, coincidentally, is an additional example of elegance and grace, with a gently pastoral flavor. The concluding Rondò, in minuet time, has the freshness and even the brevity of a Ländler, one of those country dances that Mozart (among others) used to compose on the occasion of outdoor parties and dances.
A few months later, we find our wanderlust genius in Paris, where he receives a commission from Count De Guines, a modest flautist with a harp-playing daughter (once again the usual music for nobles...). If we believe the usual biographers, who also put the harp among the instruments opposed by Mozart, we must assume that the job was accepted as some sort of ordeal. But the Concerto for Flute and Harp in C Major K 299 seems to have been made to deny this hypothesis. Simple as required by the limited skills of the clients (a little less clumsy was the harpist), it has its strength in the clear and "neoclassical" grace of the combination of these two voices so different from each other, as well as in their loving "chatter". To find such a complete enhancement of these two instruments, one will have to wait for Debussy's impressionistic brushstrokes. It opens with a lively Allegro, based on an initial theme of disarming simplicity, which however later generates an abundant bloom of imaginative developments, up to the masterful cadenza, in which flute and harp tenderly dialogue without the conditioning of the orchestra, offering a foretaste of the atmosphere that will prevail in the celestial Andantino, one of the most inspired of all slow Mozart movements. So melodious that it can be easily whistled, with the broad phrasing of the flute delicately supported by the deep vibrations of the harp, with its calm sadness that seems to anticipate Schubert, it is a musical enchantment that has only one flaw: that it ends too soon. The agile Rondò - Allegro that closes the Concerto is a playful virtuosity contest between the two solo instruments, which seem to chase each other unrestrainedly, but the cadenza that precedes the finale briefly brings us back to the sublime melancholy of the Andantino. A little reminder, nothing more, just to leave us with a sweet taste in our mouth.
And a nice contribution to this sensation also comes from the performance, virtuosic but not excessive, of the flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal, a true master of this instrument. The contribution of the harpist Lily Laskine is also excellent; unassuming and restrained as is fitting, the profile held by the orchestra. An album that pays full homage to the greatness of the so-called "frivolous Mozart".
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