Chant de Linos [1944]

In spite of Debussy’s revelation of new aspects of the flute personality in the Prélude à “L’après-midi d’un faune” and Ravel’s development of them in La flûte enchantée in Shéhérazade and in the Pan and Syrinx episode in Daphnis et Chloé, no French composer wrote a significant piece for flute and piano before Charles Koechlin completed his Sonata in E minor in 1913. It wasn’t until the 1920s - with works by Milhaud, Ibert and Roussel - that the French tradition of high-quality music for flute and piano really got started, spinning off idiomatically written scores by Dutilleux, Jolivet, Messiaen, Boulez and Poulenc as it continued through the 1940s and 1950s.

Jolivet’s major work for flute, an instrument he favoured because of its magical and ritual associations in primitive music, is the unaccompanied Cinq Incantations of 1936. Chant de Linos was written in 1944 as a competition piece for the Paris Conservatoire - a fact which, since Dutilleux’s Sonatine and Messiaen’s Le merle noir were written for the same purpose, should not automatically condemn it as academic or as vacuously virtuosic. Far from either of those things, it was inspired, the composer has said, by a “type of ancient Greek threnody: a funeral lament, a plaint interrupted by cries and dances.” After the fervently invocatory introduction, it is actually built round a vigorous dance episode with expressively melodious slow sections on either side of it. The dance episode is recalled towards the end where it merges into an extravagantly brilliant coda.