So near and yet so far … Lucie Horsch is holding a recorder out towards me that once belonged to the great Dutch recorder virtuoso, conductor and historical performance pioneer Frans Brüggen, who died in 2014. Specifically, it’s a fourth flute – so called because it’s pitched in B flat, a fourth higher than a standard alto ‘treble’ in F – that was made for Brüggen in around 1978 by the famed Australian recorder builder Frederick Morgan. In terms of sound, this instrument is a peach, possessing all the tonal mellowness and warmth for which fourth flutes are known, and a beautifully pure core. Right at this precise moment, though, all I can think about is how visually stunning it is: a softly lustrous, dark caramel-coloured boxwood, with subtly variegated darker accents melting at intervals into its silky fine grain. I’m just desperate to touch it, but I can’t: not because Decca’s new-generation Dutch recorder star forbids it, but because our interview is happening remotely, over Zoom. So instead, here we are, Horsch holding the instrument as close to her computer camera as she can, and me leaning in so far to study it that my nose is touching my screen. Goodness knows what the view is like from her end of the call.

Still, part of the inherent joy and fascination of the recorder is precisely the endless variety of shapes, sizes, pitches, tunings, woods and sound aesthetics available for pairing with different repertoires. Horsch’s own collection, within which this Morgan now sits, is ‘around’ 50 strong (‘I haven’t counted them lately’), and if we turn to her new album, ‘The Frans Brüggen Project’, the instrument-fascination factor rockets right off the charts. With its release timed to coincide with what would have been Brüggen’s 90th-birthday year, the album is Horsch’s homage to this key figure within the resurgence of the recorder in the 1960s and the early music revival. While it’s this very instrument by Morgan that she’s clasping on the album cover (as the one on which she performs the piece Brüggen himself used to play on it, his own arrangement of Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto in E, BWV1053), the lion’s share of the recording’s early 18th-century works were played on 14 truly historical recorders, made between the 1680s and 1740s, from a 17-strong collection that Brüggen amassed and occasionally performed upon and which remains today in the care of his widow, Machtelt Brüggen Israëls. Given that if a recorder has survived three centuries it tends to be owing to its having been made of more valuable materials than was standard, the beauty and craftmanship across the Brüggen collection is seriously high-end, with lots of ivory (including a c1730-40 all-ivory sixth flute – ie in D – engraved from top to toe with a beautiful grapevine pattern), ebony and even one alto wrapped in flame-red turtle shell.

Horsch was initially introduced to this private collection through her former teacher Walter van Hauwe, who was a pupil of Brüggen and co-founder with him of the avant-garde recorder trio Sour Cream. That she was subsequently granted the exceptional permission to record on the instruments might perhaps have been because Brüggen Israëls sensed her immediate love and reverence for them. ‘They felt like the perfect example of what I love about the recorder as an instrument,’ Horsch remembers, with gratitude, of the moment when she first saw them all laid out in the Brüggen home. ‘They are all completely different, each with a real personality of its own. They also demand your respect, because they’re actually very difficult to play on – they’re saying, “To make me sound good, you need to change your normal technique.”’

Horsch’s producer, Dominic Fyfe, was immediately captivated by the idea of using the Decca sound to capture and preserve as many of these historical recorder voices as possible. To do so, though, was a unique and ambitious undertaking. At programme-building stage, the matching of each recorder’s sound to complementary repertoire came with additional restricting factors: several instruments are tuned to non-standard baroque pitches, and thus are not easily combined with other instruments; some can’t achieve a good high note in a certain tonality; and none have the two double-hole chromatic bottom notes that today’s instruments have – which is partly surmountable by half-covering the hole with your finger, but only if you’re playing piano. And for Horsch, the odd duff note in the name of an otherwise perfectly suited piece was not an option. ‘If people stumble on the album randomly on Spotify, not knowing the backstory, I wouldn’t want them to just think that the recorder is an instrument that’s out of tune.’

Lucie Horsch playing Frans Brüggen’s fourth flute in B flat made by Frederick Morgan in 1978 (photo: Kaupo Kikkas)

She also quickly realised that these historical instruments just generally work in a slightly different way from modern ones. ‘One of the powers of the recorder is articulation,’ she explains. ‘There’s no real embouchure, so you can use your mouth to say really any letter. But with historical instruments the options for what you can do with your speech are far more limited. A very harsh tonguing, and the note wouldn’t really sound. Instead, the basis for everything is the core sound quality and its preservation. So sometimes I needed to change my interpretation slightly, play notes longer and more legato than I would otherwise. I had to completely erase my own ego.’

To all the above, add the fact that, for reasons of preservation, the majority of the recorders can’t be played for longer than three minutes at a time, after which they need to be thoroughly dried out. So at trying-out stage, this meant quick and instinctive experimentation and impression-forming. And in terms of music selection, it meant playing nothing that’s longer than three minutes (so single sonata movements or short pieces) – and ideally much less than that, to allow for patches. Brüggen Israëls attended the actual sessions as the recorders’ custodian and timekeeper, aided by recorder maker Fumitaka Saito. Each instrument required 10-20 minutes of non-playing warm-up time, something that the two of them did naturally by holding it close to their body. Horsch would then be handed each recorder for the first time right at the moment of doing the take. ‘There was literally a stopwatch,’ she laughs. ‘Sometimes it was, “OK, you have 10 seconds left,” so the recording engineers would say, “OK, let’s try a patch of bar 120,” and then that was it.’ In most cases, therefore, the first take was the take.

In some cases, Horsch hadn’t yet played the full piece on the instrument she was recording it on, and would be adapting as she went, sometimes even inventing non-standard fingerings, based on the feeling the recorder was giving in terms of what it would or would not be capable of. ‘It was very much an intuitive job,’ she smiles. ‘If a note didn’t sound good, my reflex would fill in the puzzle. Yet you also start to understand that the instruments were built with a completely different philosophy from nowadays. Today, we want an instrument to be predictable, reliable. Back then, I sense the sound aesthetic was more one where there were imperfections and weaknesses, and that that was not necessarily seen as being ugly.’

Horsch’s orchestral partner is Brüggen’s own period-instrument Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, founded in 1981, in which his nephew Albert Brüggen is still principal cellist. She cites with gratitude its members’ willingness to work around the instruments’ needs rather than their own. They also gave her one of her most precious memories from the sessions, on the very first day, and with the very first piece they recorded: her own transcription of the Adagio from Marcello’s Oboe Concerto in D minor, played on a c1720 alto in F by Jan Steenbergen. ‘We did a few try-out takes with my own instrument,’ she remembers. ‘Then Machtelt handed me the Steenbergen and I walked back to the spot where there was a blanket on the floor so that if a part fell off the recorder it wouldn’t break. We played one take, and the orchestra’s double bass player told me afterwards that she was in tears because of the sound and spirit of this instrument. It reminded the musicians of Frans Brüggen. So to know that they were touched by the way I was playing on that instrument gave me a lot of confidence, because I was nervous, hoping I was worthy enough to play on it, and wondering if it was going to sound well.’ She adds, ‘I think that the recorder can touch people in a very direct way – perhaps because of the directness of the sound. It’s almost as emotional as a voice.’

One of the oldest instruments you’ll hear is a c1680-1700 ebony and ivory tenor in C by French maker Hotteterre. ‘The larger instruments tended to need more time to be woken up, and this was one which improved and blossomed the most from being played,’ she outlines. ‘At the beginning there was a lot of air noise around its sound – very much the traverso sound aesthetic. But I play the recorder because I love the pure sound, so I tried to find that in the instrument.’ And for repertoire: ‘The Hotteterre family were also composers, so I chose two of Jacques-Martin Hotteterre’s preludes, which are really beautiful miniatures, just 30 seconds each; and while it’s not known which Hotteterre built that tenor, there will have been a close connection and similar sound aesthetic.’

With the smallest instruments, meanwhile, it’s a case of, ‘You get what you get. There won’t be much sound development.’ So for the ‘newest’ of the historical recorders, a tiny ivory sopranino made in 1740 by English maker Benjamin Hallet whose 415.3Hz tuning made combining with other instruments tricky, Horsch latched on to its birdlike sound with three tunes from The Bird Fancyer’s Delight, published in 1708 by John Walsh. ‘In the 18th century, there was a big market for caged singing-birds, as well as so-called flageolets – a close cousin of the recorder,’ Horsch explains. ‘The tunes from The Bird Fancyer’s Delight were all named after a particular bird and written to be taught to the bird in question. For this, a special type of “bird flageolet” was used, which had a very high pitch, roughly the same as a sopranino recorder. It felt fitting to record these British bird songs on a historical sopranino built by the British recorder maker Benjamin Hallett.’

Among her favourite instruments in Brüggen’s collection are two voice flutes built in London c1700-25 by French maker Peter Bressan, which were probably made as a pair and thus are the only two instruments with similar sound qualities. ‘They have this kind of sensuality,’ she says, with admiration. ‘They made me want to do flattements (finger vibratos) and nice ornaments, so I chose François Couperin’s Quatrième concert.’

A guest artist on the album is baroque violinist Rachel Podger, with whom Horsch had only briefly performed previously. She plays in the work that Horsch names as the most fun of all to record: the two outer movements of Telemann’s Trio Sonata in A minor, TWV 42:a4, recorded on two altos that both happened to be tuned to 408Hz. ‘There was just so much joy and dialogue between us,’ she glows. ‘I remember thinking, “I’m so lucky – to be still so young, but also already able to work with amazing musicians like Rachel.”’ However, from a critic’s standpoint, the 25-year-old’s ‘luck’ is more the natural fruit of good decisions and attitudes. Born into a family of professional string players (cellist parents, her father principal cello of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, in which her violinist older brother now also plays), she asked for recorder lessons aged five, ‘because I wanted to do something different’. But it was to the home environment that she turned for her playing philosophy. ‘It was the romantic, symphonic way of music, where the first thing is to have a very nice sound, the second is that it needs to be in tune, and then that you play the notes that are written with conviction and integrity.’

Spotting Horsch’s happiness on stage, her parents entered her in competitions, which in turn produced accolades, concerts and – when she was 14 – an offer from Decca, turned down on grounds of her age. But Decca waited, and in 2016, aged 17, she recorded her debut album, ‘Vivaldi’, allowing the label to combine an unknown recorder player with a marketable composer, and giving Horsch a huge choice of concertos that she felt were in her existing repertoire, making for an album that was audibly the work of a confident, technically superb musician.

From a critic’s perspective, what is striking about subsequent albums ‘Baroque Journey’ (recorded in 2018 with the Academy of Ancient Music and lutenist Thomas Dunford) and the folk and jazz-inspired ‘Origins’ (2022) is the clear sense of artistic development; and Horsch, for whom recording is simply the complementary cherry on what is largely a live-performance cake, speaks with appreciation of how Decca has allowed her to set her own pace. In the meantime, she has also completed a master’s degree in fortepiano with Olga Pashchenko, after studying the piano alongside the recorder at bachelor level. She has also just completed a master’s in singing (mezzo) – done for love, but with a beneficial results for her recorder playing: ‘I would love to teach in the future, and if I’m going to do that then I really want to teach not just what I’ve been told by my recorder teacher, but my own method; and because of everything I learnt about breathing technique on my singing journey, I’m re-evaluating a lot of the ideas I have about recorder technique.’

Now that she has completed her studies Horsch is looking forward to yet more new collaborations, mentioning with pleasure a recent one with cellist Anastasia Kobekina. Asked which contemporary composers she enjoys working with, she quickly names two who have already written for her: Freya Waley-Cohen and Lotta Wennäkoski, describing the latter as ‘a revolutionary thinker, writing really creative extended techniques for recorder that I hadn’t previously come across’. Does she ever get frustrated with perceptions of the recorder’s limitations? ‘People don’t always know that there are different types of instruments, and that a very high recorder will pierce through any orchestra of any size. But actually I love the vulnerability that the recorder has. The intimacy of the sound is what is so beautiful about it.’ Listen to the kaleidoscope of tone colours on ‘The Brüggen Project’ album, and you will hear that beauty and intimacy in abundance.

Horsch’s album ‘The Brüggen Project’ will be reviewed next issue