Staying with the Milhauds in California in the late 1950s, Stockhausen leafed through Milhaud’s latest score and said, ‘It’s funny one can still write music like this.’ Most of the pieces on this disc, representing Les Six’s complete works for flute, likewise avoid the extremes of 20th-century practice. At worst they descend to 6/8 rumty-tummery (the pastoral curse of France, as of Britain), where harmonic surprises are not enough to quell the feeling that nothing really is at stake. Headings such as nonchalant, tendre, souple and clair say it all. Honegger and Poulenc, as usual, are excepted from this criticism. Honegger in lyrical vein is always well worth hearing, as in the lovely Romance of 1953, while Poulenc’s Sonata is in a league of its own. It’s good, too, to have the piano Album des Six of 1920, which Andrew West plays with vigour, even if he’s not vulgar enough in Poulenc’s Valse for my taste. The most arresting piece is Auric’s Imaginees of 1968. Stockhausen wouldn’t recognise it as modern music, but Auric’s language here ranges more widely than one might expect and makes you wonder what he might have done had he not followed a critic’s advice in the mid-1930s and concentrated on film music.
Emily Beynon plays quite beautifully throughout. Her phrasing is natural, without exaggeration, her tone pure, dynamics well varied, intonation exemplary, and there is no heavy breathing (or at least not audible, anyway). West is not quite her equal, being a bit solid at times and in the Poulenc rushing the opening of the last movement. But this is a welcome recording