Music

The title track of Allume is by the harpist herself. Carrol McLaughlin (1952–2018) grew up in Alberta and was playing professionally as a teenager. She ran the harp department at the University of Arizona for over thirty years and founded HarpFusion, a touring harp ensemble. Allume is French for “lit,” as in a candle. One review says the piece was inspired by monastic illuminations. You can hear it: the harp is gold leaf, the flute the lettering. Neither is flashy, and both are lovely. ...

Histoire du Tango is one of Piazzolla’s most popular chamber works: a history of the tango in four scenes, written for flute and guitar and frequently stolen by cellists. Café 1930 is the decade when people stopped dancing to tango and started listening to it. It’s slow, melancholy, and more about sitting than moving. Swapping guitar for harp is an easy trade, since both are plucked. The harp has more resonance, though, so the café sounds a little more expensive. Luce keeps the flute dark and low, and the piece stays sad. ...

Auguste Durand was an organist who became a publisher. His firm, Durand & Cie, went on to publish Debussy and Ravel. Long before that, he wrote a salon piece for piano, the Première Valse, Op. 83, which sold enormously and was played in every parlor with a piano. This track turns the waltz into Christus factus est, the gradual for Holy Thursday (“Christ became obedient unto death”). It’s an odd marriage, but it works. The tune turns out to be hymn-like once you slow it down. Without the waltz rhythm, it’s a lovely, earnest melody, and on flute and harp it sounds a bit like a church on a weekday afternoon. ...

Michel Blavet was the best French flutist of the 1730s. Quantz admired him, and Frederick the Great tried and failed to hire him. He was largely self-taught and held the flute to the left. L’Henriette is the first of his Op. 2 sonatas (Apple labels it No. 2). The heart of it is the third movement, an aria named after the sonata: a simple rondeau tune that keeps coming back, each time a little more ornamented. ...

Stravinsky preferred winds to strings, and said so. In a 1924 note on his Octet, he wrote that winds better rendered “a certain rigidity of the form,” while strings were “less cold and more vague.” Coming from him, cold was a compliment. Hence the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, the Octet, a piano concerto accompanied only by winds, and the Symphony of Psalms, which has no violins or violas at all. ...

Woody Allen’s 1996 musical, with Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, Tim Roth and Drew Barrymore. The cast sings old standards in their own voices, and everyone sings awfully. Barrymore was the exception: she got dubbed. The awfulness adds to the fun. If I wanted someone who can sing, I’d watch an opera. The movie is really pretty, though. New York in the fall, Venice, Paris at Christmas, Goldie Hawn floating along the Seine. It even features Perlman. Everything about it is luxurious. ...

Tonight at the Logan Center: the Loeffler Octet, built around Charles Martin Loeffler’s 1897 octet, which clarinetist Graeme Steele Johnson found in the Library of Congress in 2020. That was the headline. The highlight came first. Poulenc wrote his Sonata for Two Clarinets at nineteen, in the army, and it’s over in about seven minutes. It’s weird, quirky, and cute: two clarinets winding around each other like snakes poking their heads out of a charmer’s basket, swaying, shaking, ducking back in. Johnson and Zachary Good played it. ...

Vittorio Monti was an Italian violinist working in Paris, and in 1904 he wrote the one piece that kept his name alive. Czardas follows the Hungarian dance form: a slow, brooding opening, then a fast section that keeps speeding up. It belongs to the violin, but everyone borrows it. Today it’s Brian Luce on flute and Carrol McLaughlin on harp, the album Allume again. The flute’s tone is woody and a little dusky, which suits the slow opening. In the fast part, the harp plays the cimbalom. ...

Grieg wrote it in 1875 for Ibsen’s Peer Gynt: Peer stumbles into the hall of the Troll King, and the trolls want to eat him. The whole piece is one short tune in B minor, played over and over, faster and louder each time, until the hall collapses. Grieg didn’t think much of it. He wrote that it reeked of cowpats and Norwegian self-satisfaction. It is now probably the most famous thing he wrote, heard in cartoons and car ads. ...

Kreisleriana, Op. 16, is a set of eight piano pieces Schumann wrote in a few days in the spring of 1838. The title refers to Johannes Kreisler, a fictional Kapellmeister in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s stories: brilliant, unstable, and half mad. The pieces alternate between wild, fast music and slow, inward music. These were the two sides Schumann gave names to: Florestan, the impulsive one, and Eusebius, the dreamer. He told Clara Wieck that she was the main idea behind the work. At the time, her father was refusing to let them marry. He dedicated it to Chopin. ...