Brighton Year-Round 2023

Karen Wong and Lance Mok Flute and Piano Recital

Karen Wong and Lance Mok

Genre: Live Music

Venue: St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

This is a welcome return. Karen Wong and Lance Mok arrive back at St Nicholas with a Flute and Piano Recital to play Karl Fruhling’s Fantasie, Richard Stoker’s Diversions and Mélanie Bonis’ Flute Sonata.

Karl Fruhling’s Fantasie for Flute and Piano Op 55

Living from 1868-1937, Fruhling’s known mainly for just one work, his recently rediscovered (around 1989, on Radio 3) Clarinet Trio Op 40 of 1900. A wonderful post-Brahmsian piece, flecked a bit like early Zemlinksy, and then moving somewhere nearer late Liszt in its most searching moments, it’s been played a lot; and subsequently recorded no less by Michael Collins Steven Isserlis and Stephen Hough. It was Isserlis who alerted famed flautist Emily Benyon to this work, who’s edited it.

This Fantasie though has picked up admirers and there’s several performances on YouTube. Dating from as late as 1929, written for a flautist who also inspired a Duet a little later, these were among Fruhling’s last works, perhaps. It was originally for Flute and Orchestra, though Fruhling, an expert pianist who worked with the best, made a very idiomatic arrangement for the current forces. Over a hundred have been listed, Benyon adds, but so many have vanished. A Viennese Jew born in Lviv, Ukraine, Fruhling probably suffered antisemitism. died in abject poverty, perhaps thereby escaping an even worse fate.

It’s a passionate work, with elements of burbling as Benyon puts it, ruffling the piano’s calm and allowing us to feel the pulse, like a sinew of water, beneath the feathery spray of the flute. It’s not easy to describe the 13-14 minutes of evolving fantasia sound. It recalls more French work – France being the home of the flute – than German.

There’s a touch of Chaminade and certainly Faure in this, particularly the opening: though Carl Reinecke’s Flute Concertino at one remove, yet something more modern. There’s more pointilistic figuration and Lisztian writing for the piano though, and something of Fruhling himself, a composer who emerges more clearly with this second popular work. But with the end recalling Bizet too, I’m surprisd at how French this work sounds, knowing Fruhling’s other work sounds. Yet like that work too, its overall mood is exuberant, literally spring-like, as is Fruhling’s name.

Still, Fruhling’s still happy in a post-Brahmsian glow, and so should we be. Not that Brahms would have written in this form.

Wong’s strong rounded tone is beautifully centred: a full, rich core of flute sonance with all the tessitura and reach you need. There’s a slightly aureate sound to her playing.

Mok, now an acclaimed composer, is well-known here too. His playing of Prokofiev and Hindemith is rightly celebrated, as are both artists’ curiosity and desire to probe untapped repertoire.

Richard Stoker (1938-2021) Diversions

Stoker might be best described as a composer after Richard Rodney Bennett in his lighter mode, as well as (more obviously) Malcolm Arnold and his four-part diversions might resemble, say the five Clarinet pieces of Finzi in form, or indeed further back, William Hurlstone. It’s a British tradition to place four woodwind/piano miniatures and then give them a Arthur Bliss-like title from the 1920s instead of Suite.  Again Arnold did this in the 1960s, but more formally.

The perky Prelude is succeeded by a cascading Scherzando showing off the flute’s wilder reaches, and only slowing a little for  the Chant, the nearest we get to any reflection. It’s a study in how to bring the skirling energies of the previous movements into some kind of iterated, almost ritual repeated song. Then we’re off in the boogie-exuberance of a Dance. These are like a sorbet between courses, the scent-laden late French-Germanic romanticism of Fruhling, and the heady late Faure-Chausson palate of what follows in Mel Bonis.

Mélanie Bonis (1858-1937) Flute Sonata in C sharp minor

A fellow-student of Debussy four years her junior, and exact contemporary of Chaminade, Bonis’ star has risen enormously in the past decade, with the rediscovery of many works – chamber music establishing her as a successor to Fauré more than an Impressionist, but that means some dark enharmonic corners.

Bonis was obscured first by her family with an enforced marriage to a much older man, after being removed from her Conservatoire studies. Then of course by her gender. However in the early 1890s Mel began a passionate affair with an old fellow student (whom the family had balefully noted when they removed Mel), bore him a daughter, and became increasingly liberated as composer and woman in the 1890s.

Though remaining more conservative in idiom than those born in the succeeding decades, she’s progressive enough by the side of her 1850s contemporaries, many of whom she long outlived. Now she has many CDs devoted to her principally chamber works. The two Piano Quarters make an excellent introduction.

This lovely work, powered in four movements, gets better as it goes along. There opening Andantino con moto is attractive and quite searching, the Scherzo -Vivace, with a lilt that’s quite infectious. The real finds come alter though. If the Adagio is more contemplative than grave, it picks out a melancholy, thoughtful hinterland that refuses the tragedy offered it. In the finale though – a Moderato – we find in Wong and Mok ideal interpreters.

Because they don’t play it quite Moderato nor should it feel that way. Bonis seems energised when she’s playing at a kind of Allegro speed: her big-boned dramatic chamber-music identity unleashes its potential. Neither charmingly salon-fat, which she can do as consummately as Gaubert or many others, perhaps better, and not at least on this hearing wholly in tune with her Adagio side, her moderate to allegro power shows a thew and lilt that’s memorable, nailing this work with a potent almost defiant elan.

A gem of a recital: three works we don’t know, and are glad to, played consummately.

Published July 13, 2023July 13, 2023 by Simon Jenner