Sorry this question is more about classical than trad but in modern trad we play these old wooden flutes named after bygone stars like Nicholson and Pratten, so I was curious to hear what a performance by those folks might have sounded like. I don’t know anything about classical music though so I have not been very successful searching. I’ve found a lot of baroque flutes playing earlier stuff but that’s a totally different beast. And I’ve found folks playing 1800s pieces on the silver flute of course but that just sounds like a silver flute. But as for the concert flute in between the two, I’ve so far just found one album, “The Nicholsonian Effect” performed by Martyn Shaw, which is neat to hear. It looks like Martyn did a PhD on how Nicholson and contemporaries played. I think my inability to find anything more may be simply due to my complete ignorance though? I really don’t know what to search for. Any recommendations, please, would be greatly appreciated! I’m not interested in actually playing “period” music, I’ll stick with Irish, but it’s interesting to hear. Thanks!
Try this tangent.
Wooden flutes were popular with British musicians up until the 1950s.
Go to youtube and google John Amadio. Amazing and extraordinary flute player. Althouth the recording quality is not always the best, you can hear the brilliance and possibilities provided by wooden flutes. In his case it was the Radcliff system flute.
Neat, thanks, listening to some Amadio playing right now, in some of them I do think I might hear that conical bore tone, one of the tracks I just skipped through has some neat super fast but very slight vibrato that created this sudden and uniquely fragile sound, really cool.
I’m still waiting for one of these classical players to honk out a hard and dirty bottom D but they seem to be avoiding it on purpose!!
Look for Lisa Beznosiuk.
She has some interesting tutorials on playing 19th century music on a period flute, as well as some fine performances.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Beznosiuk
https://www.rcm.ac.uk/hp/professors/details/?id=01204
It’s interesting to read 19th century descriptions of performances and of flute tone.
I don’t know if you’ve heard a modern “Irish trad” fluteplayer with an extremely powerful tone, but it would have been like that, putting out a volume that’s almost unbelievable.
It’s a common quote but I don’t have it to hand, somebody describing the ideal flute tone as combing the timbres of the clarinet and oboe, that is, having the “reedy” quality of many of the best current Irish trad fluteplayers. I believe Boehm himself mentions his fluteplaying being mistaken for a French horn.
All in all the flute tone would have been more like that which exists with some modern Irish trad players than either Baroque flutists or 20th century orchestral flutists.
In part, this is because that’s how the c1830-1880 London orchestral flutes want to be played, how they were designed to be played, and people who have spent their whole lives playing these instruments will often be led by the instruments themselves to play them the way they were originally intended. People who have spent their whole lives playing other kinds of flute who dabble with c1830-1880 London-made flutes might merely transfer how they already play to the different instrument.
One has to keep in mind that by Nicholson’s time audiences had grown, and a flutist might find himself playing in a huge outdoor tent to large crowd, and had to be heard even by the people at the back. Today we wouldn’t dream of doing the same event without microphones and speakers.
The irony of the whole thing is that Boehm was inspired by Nicholson’s immense volume, and designed the Boehm flute to do it, but nowadays Boehm flutists rarely play the instrument the way Boehm intended, with an extremely loud and reedy low range.
There are some suggestions in this discussion. https://forums.chiffandfipple.com/t/romantic-flute-virtuoso/71935/9 The suggestions early on may not be what you are looking for though. A Nicholson piece for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poSJTVwTZAM
Thanks Fintano, David, for the leads, I will follow them!
Richard, that is interesting, yeah once in a while I find that perfect air stream that is startlingly very loud, but I have a long way to go to get good at it! Do you mean like the tone that eg Kirsten Alstaff gets? Among current players of irish flute I’ve noticed that her tone really screams and leaves a compelling impression (like an air horn, but in a good way) - it seems to be tapping into something in the instrument
Not exactly what you’re looking for, but Chris Norman has done quite a bit of stuff that touches on 18th-19th century music, and I suspect his tone is very close to that of 19th century players.
He did an album with Byron Schenkman. IIRC Schenkman plays pianoforte and harpsichord and the music is 18th-early 19th century chamber music.
His album The Man With the Woodan Flute is my absolute favorite flute album and has folk and music ascribed to composers (e. g., Dowland, Carolan, O’Cahan. . .). Here’s Carolan’s The Fairy Queen from that album.
He also did several (8-10) albums with the Baltimore Consort. They’re an “English consort” doing old parlor music. Each of their albums focused on particular region or type of music – one Irish, one Scottish, one Playford tunes, etc. Here’s an old tune from the Neal collection.
thanks chas this is good stuff!