Emmanuel Pahud reviews

There’ll be a lot of Debussy around in 2018, the centenary of the French composer’s death. With this recording, a group of France’s finest musicians gets ahead of the game to celebrate his chamber music – and by doing so prove that sometimes anniversaries can indeed be jolly good things.

Although his successors thought highly of CPE Bach – Mozart said ‘although Emmanuel Bach is the father, we are the children’ and Beethoven recommended him as a model to his composition students – he was never so well regarded by Frederick the Great. He joined the Royal Court in 1740 as Chamber Musician, and the three concertos on Emmanuel Pahud’s disc were not commissions from the King but simply arrangements of earlier keyboard concertos.

Emmanuel Pahud’s tribute to the French flute school journeys through three decades of the Revolutionary period, from the mellifluous style galant of Gluck’s G major Concerto to feisty, eclectic and militaristic works by Luigi Gianella, Ignaz Pleyel and François Devienne (known in his day as the ‘Mozart of the Flute’). The bravura and lyricism of Italian opera pervade throughout, and Pahud responds with playing of an aptly vocal quality, eloquently phrased and shaded according to the music’s emotion.

Les Vents Français is a starry pan-European group of leading orchestral players and soloists, comprising flautist Emmanuel Pahud, oboist François Leleux, clarinettist Paul Meyer, horn player Radovan Vlatkovi´c and bassoonist Gilbert Audin. Individually, they play with attractive timbre and immaculate intonation and articulation. Collectively, they blend their colours with great finesse, within dynamics ranging from cushioned pianissimo to bright fortissimo, the latter enhanced by an upfront recording.