Sharon Bezaly, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Richard Tognetti - Pipe Dreams (2012) CD-Rip

On a wide selection of recordings – solo, with orchestra, and in chamber music – Sharon Bezaly has demonstrated not only ‘utter commitment to the works’ but also ‘the most technically assured, breathtakingly brilliant flute-playing around’ (Fanfare). On Pipe Dreams, she appears with the eminent Australian Chamber Orchestra and their leader Richard Tognetti in a programme which takes its name from the Australian composer Carl Vine’s work for flute and orchestra. As the composer writes, a basic idea for the work is ‘the folly that a flute – the instrument itself – might harbour its own secret wishes. In a universe where all is possible, what might a flute dream?’ Intriguingly this also offers a key for possible interpretations of the other works on the disc. The Pitangus Sulphuratus of the Venzuelan composer Adina Izarra’s concerto – composed in 1987, but with a new cadenza written especially for Bezaly – is a yellow and brown bird found in great numbers in the Caracas valley. Its call appears throughout the piece, especially in evocations (or dreams?) of moods typical of Caracas: a lazy and hot March afternoon, or the gentle swinging of a hammock. Such episodes are interspersed with fast and rhythmically intricate variations on the merengue. Another dance, the tango, makes a fleeting and inconclusive, almost dreamlike appearance in Flute Concerto with Tango, which the Uruguayan composer and celebrated conductor José Serebrier has dedicated to Sharon Bezaly. Impresiones de la Puna, finally, embodies the dream of an eighteen-year-old Alberto Ginastera of finding a truly Argentinean musical language, tracing it back to the indigenous music of the high plateaus of the central Andes, the puna.