Philippe Gaubert: Pièces Romantiques

Kathryn Thomas - flute
Richard Shaw - piano
Phoebe Scott - cello

Playing time 73 mins.

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Classic FM magazine, Jan 2001

Philippe Gaubert was a much admired conductor in his day and a virtuoso flautist. This anthology shows his refinement of craftsmanship and freshness of inspiration. Not 'great' music but full of Gallic charm which is well conveyed in these accomplished performances and well recorded.
Robert Layton.

PAN Magazine, The British Flute Society, June 2001

Gaubert must surely be considered the great-grandfather of modern flute players, passing on the tradition from Taffanel down through Moyse, so it is good to have a whole CD of his music.

Gaubert, who was a refined flute-player to his marrow, broadened his musical horizons throughout his life as a respected conductor and composer in various genres, and he has left us some lovely music. On this CD, we have three sonatas, the Madrigal (which must be known by most flute-players), Orientale and, with the cello, Trois Aquarelles and Pièce Romantique (here recorded for the first time), all of which you can read about in the excellent booklet notes.

Gaubert's music is lovely to play and to listen to and I am sure he would have approved of the performances on this disc. There is a unanimity of purpose in the ensemble which is very persuasive and I really enjoyed hearing Kathryn Thomas's sympathetic handling of the music and her smooth and warm tone, which never became shrill. One was never aware of technical demands getting in the way of musical demands. A CD to be possessed on all counts.
Dennis Clarke.

Musician Magazine (Musicians Unition)

If you love flute music the first CD is tailor-made for you. Kathryn THomas is well known as the flautist with the Galliard Ensemble and Richard Shaw is equally well known as a piano accompanist. Between them they give very fine performances of five works by Philippe Gaubert for flute and piano. Kathryn's full lyrical playing is wonderfully matched by Richard's sensitive and expressive accompaniment.

In the last two works, also by Philippe Gaubert - Trois Aquarelles and Pieces Romantiques - the duo is joined by cellist Phoebe Scott. This very rich combination of instruments is one of the highlights of the CD. The energy, lyrcism, and conviction of all three players brings out the very best in these two delightful compositions. All in all, a beautiful CD.
Graham Williams.

The Classical Source, Feb 2001

This music is saturated in the elegance and lyrical grace that we recognise as French. Long, sensuous lines are gratefully received by the ears; the heart responds to the deeper vein of expression that French composers are so adept at side-stepping to – an emotional sleight of hand which transforms innocence to something darker, more experienced. A relaxed urbanity informs Gaubert’s music, as charming as a spring day, but there will an aside, a confidence shared, en route.

As for Gaubert himself: he was born in 1879, died in 1941, was a highly regarded flautist (his writing for the instrument is assured and idiomatic) and developed parallel careers as a composer and conductor; as the latter he made a number of recordings including the Second Daphnis Suite with Walter Straram’s Orchestra in 1930 and Saint-Saens’s Second Concerto with Rubinstein in 1939.

The recording is well balanced and truthful ...and the performances are sympathetic and shapely ... the music is worthy of advocacy and it’s good to find these skilled musicians exploring the byways of their repertoire. Flute-fanciers and francophiles needn’t hesitate.
Colin Anderson.

Classical Music on the Web

Phillippe Gaubert, who died in 1941, left an indelible impression on flute playing, particularly in the United States. He was the first major flautist to adopt the open hole standard of playing and many of his students emigrated to the US to take up principal positions with the great American orchestras in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and New York. To this day, one can still hear the sense of timbre, control and silvery tone which Gaubert taught. Homogenised it may sound, but with tempered use of vibrato it can be often seduce the ears in evocative and poetic ways.

Not surprisingly, his compositions display many of these attributes. These are often works which stand musically apart from the tempestuous politics of the time. The First Sonata, for example, was composed in 1917 - and yet none of the fragility or despondency of a world order on the brink of calamity can be sensed in any of its three movements. The intense poetry of the middle Lent stands next to the optimism and enthusiasm of the outer movements. There is almost no stylistic development from this earliest work and the later sonatas from 1924 and 1933 - the mood is tangentially optimistic and laden with Debussyesque cadences.

If the style is traditionally French - just as Prokofiev's for his flute sonata was authentically Russian - this is not necessarily a drawback. But one encounters the same difficulties listening to this disc in one sitting as one would with the Ysaye violin sonatas - an element of repetitiveness and lack of invention, something one never encounters with the masters of French Impressionism, Debussy and Ravel. Taken as individual works interspersed with something else they are a miraculous tonic for a typically wet London morning.

Fortunately, Kathryn Thomas has a glorious tone - and her sense of the dynamic range of these works is finely attuned. This is particularly so in the Pièce Romantique, more akin to Chausson, but almost orchestral in some of its textures (listen to the flute's entrance after the piano and cello obilgato). Thomas' playing is always relaxed and loose, the sound often rich and reedy. None of the metallic hollowness one can sometimes associate with the steel flute appears evident on this clean and atmospheric recording. Her playing brims with confidence and lustre - and she has fine accompanists in Richard Shaw and Phoebe Scott. This is undoubtedly a beautiful disc - and a beautifully played one.

Performance and Recording **** (four stars out of five)
Marc Bridle.

The Flying Inkpot, March 2001

This review first appeared on The Flying Inkpot

It's always a delight to find an album like this one, which presents a collection of rare chamber music for flute and piano, as well as trios for the unusual combination of flute, cello and piano. The Impressionistic influence in his music is nigh unmistakable - Monet's words on this artistic impetus comes to mind:

Try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, a horse, a field, whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, the exact colour and shape, until it gives your own naïve impression of the scene before you.

Philippe Gaubert (1879-1941; pictured right) will not be a familiar name to many. His claim to fame (if we can use such a phrase) is not, by any stretch of the word, particularly distinctive, even if he was Assistant Conductor of the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire from 1904, Chief Conductor in 1919 and Director of Music at the Paris Opéra in 1924 (etcetera etcetera etcetera...)

But he was well acquainted with his fellow composers of the day and did give a number of premieres, including Fauré's Masques et Bergamasques and also conducted the Requiem at the composer's funeral. Before this, he also enjoyed an expansive career as one of the best-known French flautists, giving a number of first performances of works by his compatriots.

The young British flautist and RAM graduate Kathryn Thomas (left) makes her solo debut on this album, accompanied by Richard Shaw on piano. Phoebe Scott on cello makes up the third member of the group for the trio pieces, which are presented at the end of the disc. If nothing else, one has to commend Ms Thomas and her producers on the decision and selection of such neglected estorica.

The most striking feature from the very first note of the First Sonata is the clarity and sheen of Thomas's timbre: fluid as quicksilver, clear as crystal. Not only that, but she plays with consummate technical mastery and captures the nuances of Gaubert's idiom very well: in her hands (and her piano accompanist), the music takes on a piquant charm of its own, almost an imprimatur.

Richard Shaw provides able support, nowhere more evident than in the Andante of the Second Sonata where his reading is most sensitive. The Third Sonata contains some lovely soundscapes of the Impressionistic style - inward-looking, laden with pathos. Thomas and Shaw are careful not to get too carried away, for there is a certain conscientiousness in their playing.

The single-movement Madrigal and Orientale - imagine if Respighi were French - serve as mid-point separators between the three flute sonatas and two flute-cello-piano trios, but there is nothing makeweight about the quality of performance. If nothing else, these are delightful miniatures crafted at the hands of blue-blooded evangelists of Gaubert. I had half-expected déjà entendu to set in by this point, but there was none of that.

The Three Watercolours are as introspective as the flute sonatas, yet the addition of the cello greatly expands the musical palette that Gaubert draws upon. And do the trio of musicians here "draw" indeed, first sketching the musical tableaux with much verve and brio in On a Clear Morning, followed by wistful introspection in Autumn evening. The concluding Serenade is sheer delight, with the humourous thematic figures very much understated (even deadpan).

The title work of this album, Pièce Romantique, is the earliest composition (1904) by quite a margin - the next work in chronological order, the Orientale, already dates from 1914 - and it shows. With its tinge of bygone Romanticism, cellist Phoebe Scott imbues the music with some lyrical phrasing. Gaubert's inspired combination of these instruments also provide for some interesting and eloquent contours of timbre.

If there were any complaints to be raised, it would only be in the production of the disc and not the quality of playing - for there are no timings listed for each track. Also, there is virtually no information at all given on each musician in the sleeve booklet; thank goodness for press releases, but the majority of listeners buying this CD on retail who might take an interest in the biographies of these wonderful musicians won't be as fortunate. Still, this is not a major problem, not with such wonderful realisation of Gaubert's music by Thomas and her colleagues. To be honest, one might think that a person could only listen to so much flute-cum-piano music before this combination of sound textures gets wearisome: "to be taken one side at a time", to borrow a phrase from the days of cassettes. Definitely not the case here; there is sheer poetry from A to Z, and one to savour.

Benjamin Chee.