Today's lunchtime Chamber Music Prom featured Emmanuel Pahud, paying us a flying visit from his regular job as principal flautist of the Berlin Philharmonic (literally - he's flying back to Berlin for a concert in the evening). Pahud also does a lot of solo and chamber work; today, he was joined by his regular accompanist and compatriot Eric Le Sage in a programme of music written during the second world war.
As a non-flautist, I had a distinct feeling of being in a minority in the audience, and it wasn't hard to see why. The flute is an instrument that makes technical demands that are quite different from those of many other instruments, you don't see all that much flute music on concert programmes, and Pahud is a master of the instrument. One flautist sitting next to me had travelled from Dorset for this one hour recital.
The variety and challenge of the flute's soundscape was best shown off in the short piece in the middle of the concert: Dutilleux's 1943 Sonatine, written as an examination piece for the Paris Conservatoire. The flute has little equivalent of the control of bowing pressure and position available to a string player, and dynamic control is hard both at the quiet end (if you play too soft, no sound comes out at all) and at the load end (it can shriek). Expression, therefore, is mainly achieved by rhythmic variation and phrasing, together with the beautiful purity of tone that can be achieved when playing long notes. Pahud stunned us with extraordinary acceleration and lightness of touch in the faster passages, and with delicacy and lovely purity in the slower ones. The Sonatine also shows off an array of tricks in breath control, which he negotiated with flourish.
Cadogan Hall is a challenging venue for the flute (in the original sense of the word): the acoustics are crystal clear and you can hear every nuance of the instrument's sonic quality. We would have heard every tiny imperfection - except that there were hardly any to hear.