FRANK MARTIN (1890-1974)
'Ballade' for flute and piano

During the 1920s and 30s Frank Martin was at the centre of musical life in his home city of Geneva. He founded the Chamber Music Society of Geneva with some friends (he himself was a distinguished pianist and harpsichordist) and in 1933 was appointed director of the Technicum Modeme de Musique, a post he held until 1939. In that year, sheltered somewhat by Switzerland's neutral status from the political ravages of the time, the city inaugurated its International Music Performance Competition (still running today). Martin was commissioned to write a set piece for flute entrants, and the result was Ballade pour flute et Piano.

The ballade form became a favourite of Martin's. He had already written one for alto saxophone the year before, and followed the flute ballade with similar works for piano and orchestra (1939), trombone and piano (for the 1940 International Competition), cello and piano (1949) and viola and orchestra (1972). Each is a concertante work and the earliest four can perhaps be seen as 'concertos in miniature' in preparation for the more substantial Petite Symphonie Concertante (Martin's best-known work, for harp, harpsichord, piano and double string orchestra, composed in 1945). The Ballade pour Flute, which also exists in versions with accompaniments for piano and strings and full orchestra (the latter arranged by the conductor Ernest Ansermet), has a free form, in which the tempo and figuration are in constant flux. As the use of the title suggests, Martin, as it were, 'tells a story' - an unidentified one but nevertheless a miniature drama in music.

* SIMON HOLT (1958-)
'Maiastra' for solo flute (Premiere Recording)

Simon Holt is among Britain's leading composers, standing out among the composers of his generation with his bold and imaginative compositions. He was the featured composer at the 1985 Bath Festival, for which Burlesca Oscura was commissioned. He has strong relationships with contemporary groups like the London Sinfonietta and the Nash Ensemble, who have given numerous first performances of his music, which is now being performed in many parts of Europe and the Soviet Union. Maiastra was written for Wissam Boustany in 1981, who gave its first public performance in February 1983 at the Wigmore Hall, London. The title comes from a sculpture of the same name by Constantin Brancusi dating from 1915 (see above).

BÉLA BARTOK (I881-1945)
'Suite Paysanne Hongroise' for flute and piano

The original of Bartok's Suite Paysannem Hongroise, a set of fifteen Hungarian peasant songs for piano, dates from 1914-17, when he was also occupied with the String Quartet No. 2 and the ballet The Wooden Prince. The songs and dances are essentially miniatures - the longest, the Ballade (omitted from the Suite in this arrangement), is only two-and-a-half minutes long, and Bartok gives a timing of just ten seconds each for the third and fourth of the dance tunes. They are all typical of the stage in his career when, with his studies of central European folk music drawing to a close, he concentrated on making use of his discoveries in his own music. Unlike the quartet and the ballet, which both draw on the style of this folk music, here in the Suite Paysanne Hongroise he transcribes actual melodies and dance tunes collected during his forages in the Hungarian countryside.

The arrangement we hear in this recording is by Paul Anna, and does not attempt to stick rigidly to Bartok's original; in fact he omits one of the movements entirely, and adds certain contrapuntal details to the music. He has done this, whilst preserving the essential character and mood of the music.

* WISSAM BOUSTANY (1960-)
'Improvisation I' for solo flute

As the title suggests, this is an improvisation. Please see above for further details.

BOHUSLAV MARTINU (1890-1959)
'Flute Sonata No. I' for flute and piano

Martinu spent more than half of his life exiled from his Czech homeland, first voluntarily - he simply found the Paris of the 1920s and 'Les Six' a more conducive compositional environment than Prague - but later, like so many others, he fled from Nazi-occupied Europe to the USA. The years that followed were particularly prolific artistically, (his music had preceded him across the Atlantic, so he arrived to find himself something of a musical celebrity), though homesickness never really left him. One of his most powerful works of the war years was Memorial to Lidice written in the wake of hearing about a blood-bath in his Bohemian village. The village was completely wiped out by Hitler Youth in June 1943 as a reprisal for an assassination In Prague.

In February 1945 Slovakia was liberated and by May the Germans had been ousted from Prague. Martinu considered returning to his homeland, but his mother had died the year before and his closest friend, Stanislav Novak, died just months before Armistice. With these ties to Czechoslovakia lost, he hesitated about going back immediately and took a holiday that summer to Cape Cod on the Massachusetts coast to sort out his ideas though he didn't in fact leave the States until 1953. He continued composing, producing in a matter of weeks a Czech Rhapsody for violin and piano, a cycle of Polkas his and Etudes for piano and his Sonata for Flute and Piano. The latter, dedicated to Rene le Roy, is a three-movement work and the motif of the finale is said to be derived from the song of the whippoorwill, a bird that sang all night long during that summer. Incidentally, fifty years before, Dvorak had been similarly pestered by a birdsong, enough to incorporate it in his American String Quartet.

Programme notes by Matthew Rye

* Notes with an asterisk by Wissam Boustany