Benjamin Godard is mostly forgotten now, except for the Berceuse from Jocelyn and his Suite de trois morceaux, Op. 116, which every flute student knows. He wrote it in 1890 for Paul Taffanel, the father of the French flute school. The Idylle is the slow middle movement: a simple, singing tune over a simple accompaniment. It’s written for flute and piano, but today I listened to it with harp, Brian Luce on flute and Carrol McLaughlin on harp. It’s cute this way. The harp’s texture is softer than the piano’s, and the whole piece feels like silk. Or like waves: a beautiful, classy river with personality. West Lake, or something. ...

Debussy should talk to Saint-Saëns about pieces they don’t like getting published. Saint-Saëns wouldn’t let The Carnival of the Animals be published while he was alive (only The Swan got out), so it came out after he died. Debussy wasn’t so lucky. He wrote Rêverie around 1890 and sold it for the money, and when Fromont went to print it in 1905 he wrote to them that he regretted it — he’d written it in a hurry, and it was a piece of no importance. ...

Tonight at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival I went to see Joshua Redman play solo at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. Rockefeller Chapel, full house. He has decent technique. Joshua Redman, just him and a tenor. But even with a well-trained ear, I couldn’t appreciate the chords, and the melodies felt clueless to me. Sometimes I couldn’t tell whether a note was intentional or a mistake, though often I could tell it was a mistake. ...

On my first day back in Chicago, my friend took me to the CSO. Klaus Mäkelä conducting: Sibelius — Symphony No. 7 Shostakovich — Symphony No. 4 Before Mäkelä walks out. Today is also Shostakovich’s 120th birthday. Happy birthday to the wonderful, rebellious composer. “Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony, written under Stalin’s shadow, shows the composer at his most wild and audacious.” He pulled it during rehearsals in 1936, months after Pravda attacked his opera Lady Macbeth, and it wasn’t performed until 1961. He thought it was never going to be played, but here we are today. ...

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Prokofiev wrote the Flute Sonata in 1943, in wartime evacuation, in the middle of War and Peace. He said he wanted something “with classical, clear, transparent sonority” — and what came out is a sonata in D major that behaves as if the previous thirty years had not happened. No irony, no grimacing. Sviatoslav Richter and the flautist Nikolai Kharkovsky premiered it in Moscow on 7 December 1943. The following year David Oistrakh talked him into rewriting it for violin, which became the Second Violin Sonata, Op. 94bis, and that version is now played roughly ten times as often. Flautists have a legitimate grievance here. The piece is native to the flute — the long, wide-interval melody in the first movement, the way the third movement sits in the instrument’s weakest register and asks it to sing there anyway. On the violin all of that is merely beautiful. On the flute it is beautiful and slightly precarious, which is better. ...

Leonard Bernstein was born on today (August 25) in 1918. Candide opened on Broadway in 1956 and closed after two months — a famous, thorough failure that Bernstein and his collaborators kept revising for the next thirty years without ever quite fixing. The overture survived on its own. It is four and a half minutes long, it gets played by more orchestras than almost any other American concert piece, and it is a small masterclass in how to be funny in orchestral writing without ever winking at the audience. ...

Vivaldi’s Op. 10, published in Amsterdam around 1729, was the first set of concertos for transverse flute ever printed. Before that the instrument was a curiosity in the orchestra; after that it had a repertoire. Six concertos, and the second one is La notte — the night. It is a strange piece, structurally. Instead of the usual fast–slow–fast, it runs through a sequence of short movements with titles: a Largo opening, then Fantasmi — ghosts — then a second Largo, a Presto, then Il sonno, sleep, and finally an Allegro. ...

Tchaikovsky wrote the Valse-Scherzo in early 1877, a few months before the Violin Concerto, and it is his second and slighter work for violin and orchestra — six minutes, C major, no ambitions beyond charm. The printed score carries the inscription à Monsieur Joseph Kotek: Iosif Kotek, his former pupil at the Moscow Conservatory, the violinist who would sit beside him the following summer working through the concerto bar by bar, and the man Tchaikovsky wrote about in letters to his brother in language he used for nobody else. ...

Claude Debussy was born on today (August 22) in 1862! Happy birthday to the master! The Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra (L.73) was composed in 1889–90 and never performed in Debussy’s lifetime. When a Paris concert was arranged and he learned that only the first movement would be played, he pulled the parts from the stands before the rehearsal began. He would rather the piece not be heard than heard incompletely. It wasn’t premiered until 1919, a year after his death. ...