Ensemble Zauberflote

Press, 23 October 1989, Page 6

Ensemble Zauberflote

Ensemble Zauberflote, in the Great Hall, October 22, at 2 p.m. Reviewed by Paul Goodson. This recital was notable principally for its curiosity value. An ensemble of some 15 flautists with instruments ranging from piccolo to bass flute has little in the way of tailormade repertoire. The best-stocked poaching grounds lie within the estates of string ownership. But transcriptions are not simply a matter of transferring the parts from one set of instruments to another.

Strong string downbows, for instance, have no direct wind equivalent. Almost inevitably there was some scrambled semiquaver work in the outer movements of Bach’s Sixth Brandenburg Concerto and amorphous textures throughout, which clouded the clarity of Bach’s contrapuntal writing. With its strong, incisive pulse, the last movement fared the best. But greater staccato treatment here, and in the quick

movements of Mozart’s Divertimento K. 136, would have pointed the texture more cleanly. Stylistically speaking, the Divertimento is really solo music — string quartet — and conductorless playing and full chamber onslaught highlighted the same problems of ensemble and articulation. The Presto finale was taken too fast for comfort. Of the remaining works, “Under the Forest Canopy,’’ by the Australian composer, Farbach, was in many respects the most arresting, simply because it was written expressly for Zauberflote.

This short, highly-atmospheric piece exploited a wide range of timbres in varying combinations. The absence of silences and points of stasis suggested the constant interplay of life and movement within a forest The versions of Barber’s early Adagio and the Adagio from Bruckner’s String Quintet were unconvincing, with the plangent

sonorities of the original string scoring muffled to the point of indeterminacy. Generally speaking, Allegro movements respond better to woodwind transcription, and the less cello work hoisted on to alto (or bass) flutes, the better.

Doppler’s showpiece "Hungarian Pastoral Fantasy,” was a harmless piece of vacuous virtuosity, but the so-called “Pinschofony Act” should only be performed by consenting adults in private. Intelligent pastiche is a delight, but this was a banal and clumsily-scored display of musical harlotry. Members of this ensemble are technically proficient Relaxed embouchure on the larger instruments leads to unavoidable penetration problems in the lower registers, but the over-all sound was homogeneous and, except in rapid scallic passages, reasonably tight. Unearthing suitable repertoire, however, is likely to remain a problem for this group.