The Artistry of Barthold Kuijken

The Artistry of Barthold Kuijken is an anthology of the great Dutch Baroque flutist's recordings, selected and annotated by the performer himself. As such, it's just about ideally done. Although most of the recordings are recent, they date back as far as 1978 in the case of the Fantasia VII in D major from the 12 Fantasias for transverse flute solo. This came from Kuijken's first recording for the Accent label, and it's in the shape of a French overture, thereby making it doubly appropriate for the opening. From there Kuijken chronologically proceeds through the flute's history, not through his own, which would have been considerably less interesting. You get to hear flutes (or copies of them) from around 1710 to 1830, each deployed for appropriate music, and you can't help but marvel at how different Kuijken sounds in each pieces, and how untroubled he is by the Baroque/Classical stylistic divide that trips up so many musicians. His true métier is the crackling, seductive, highly ornamented music of François Couperin, but he shifts gears for the much less ornamented and more Sonata in E minor for flute and continuo, BWV 1034, of Bach, and then for works by C.P.E. Bach and Mozart, themselves an utterly diverse Classical pair. One might feel that in the Schubert Introduction and Variations on "Trockne Blumen" he has substituted Baroque Affekt for Romantic drama, but his performance of this rarely heard bit of Schubert is nonetheless absorbing, with a keen grasp of how the composer plays off the expectation that the flute will be the subordinate instrument of the pair. The last three of these works are accompanied on fortepiano. Kuijken's reflections in the booklet are almost worth the purchase price in themselves, mixing personal reflections with descriptions of the problems players encounter with old flutes, and beautiful descriptions of the individual pieces and of the process of matching them with an appropriate instrument. The sound varies quite a bit among these performances -- to be expected, given that each one was thought out as an individual entity sonically as well as musically, but still just a bit of a jolt at times. This album is highly recommended to Kuijken fans or to anyone wanting to sample the many ancestors of the more flashy modern metal flute. ~ James Manheim, All Music Guide