Concertino for flute and orchestra Op.107

Still distant from Vienna, the scene changes to Paris where in 1902 Cécile Chaminade, the leading woman composer of her day, was commissioned to write a test piece for final-year flute students at the Conservatoire. A remarkably accomplished score – which sets the slender solo instrument against an orchestra including four horns, three trombones and tuba – it is just one of many indications that Chaminade’s present reputation, as little more than an amateur, does her a serious injustice.

Chaminade’s Concertino for flute resembles Lehár’s for violin in that is cast in one movement. Both its thematic material and its structure are more clearly defined however. In the first of the three major sections the flute introduces and elaborates the lovely, slightly nostalgic main theme and then retreats to allow the orchestra to take it up. After some expressive development there is a centrally place scherzo in which the soloist performs a prodigious series of acrobatics. Although an oboe and later a horn contribute a bright bell-like motif here, the orchestra is more inclined to return to the main theme – which the flute greets with a thoughtful, unaccompanied cadenza. The events of the first section are more or less literally repeated up to the orchestral statement of the main theme before the soloist impatiently brushes it aside for a brilliant and resourcefully sustained Presto coda.