Great 20th Century Flute Music – Ingela Øien

Ingela Øien´s journey into the musical world of 20th century flute music

André Jolivet was a composer for whom expressiveness in music was absolutely central. In his “Cinq Incantations”, the movements, with their long and evocative titles, are both highly original and timeless, endowed with an expressive virtuosity and rhythmic élan that is nothing less spellbinding. Olivier Messiaen was undoubtedly the most important composer of his generation. The experience of nature meant very much to Messiaen, and this rare world springs frequently out of the song of birds transcribed into his music. In his “Le Merle Noir” his “bird music” is extended and transformed to fantastical impressions of mood and landscape, an evocation of the entire fabulous well-source of birds; of bush and wood, mountain and upland, water and light. Henri Dutilleux is one of the composers who has managed to position himself outside of the more usual stylistic categories. However, his Flute Sonatina mirrors, nonetheless, a shimmer of a Ravellian tonal universe, and tendencies later to become central to his mature and quite un-Ravellian style. Bohislav Martinu´s Flute Sonata, written during his sojourn in America, is an example of his very herald of cheerfulness – accommodating both gravity and levity in his musical discourse. Finn Mortensen´s music has both an expressivity and a solidity easily sufficient to land him among the foremost of his generation, also in an international perspective. To this his Flute Sonata is a striking testimony. A triumph of troubadouresque and dizzy virtuosity, the piece flaunts itself in perfect self-certainty over Neoclassicism´s dead formalism. A monumental work, one of the milestones in the Norwegian musical canon, Mortensen´s Flute Sonata remains a masterpiece for ever new generations of flutists.