SYMPHONIC POEM Flute Concerto (study score)

The number of flute concertos from the nineteenth century is rather limited: while after the technical innovations of Theobald Boehm the new techniques and expressive capacities of the instrument were utilised to the fullest embedded in orchestral music, the flute kept struggling to manifest itself as a concertante solo instrument in its own right. This was mainly due to the fact that it was difficult to let the orchestra play completely freely itself without overwhelming the flute sound. Furthermore the timbre of the flute always runs the risk of saturating the sense of hearing rather rapidly. In his Nouveau traité d’instrumentation (1885) François-Auguste Gevaert therefore wrote: ‘Except for the music written by virtuoso composers there is for the flute a conspicuous paucity of great concert solos with accompaniment by the orchestra. (…) The natural place of the flutes is in the orchestra, both for concerts and for the lyric theatre.’ In the chapter ‘The orchestra associated with the instrumental solo’ in his Cours méthodique d’orchestration (1890) Gevaert emphasises that the possibilities of wind instruments are generally not varied enough ‘to hold the scene for a long time in their own right; wind instruments are suited only for rather short pieces, conceived in a vocal style, romances or songs without words.’ And finally: ‘The entrance of a flute, of an oboe, of a bassoon after a pompous tutti is absolutely grotesque’.
With his flute concerto, composed in the last months of 1865, Benoit has managed to refute those assertions, contributing a particularly original and felicitous piece to the concertante flute repertoire. It was quite a feat for Benoit to offer full scope to both the flute and the orchestra: the latter is allowed to fully unfold its potential without however restraining the flute. Moreover there is a continuous, strong dialectics at work between the solo instrument and the orchestra. And what’s more, with a view to providing adequate variation in the sound, he changes the tessitura of the flute as much as possible.

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