Serenade to the Dawn

The initial stimulus to make this recording goes back to the year 1987, when I made my first recording for MDG. Werner Dabringhaus had the idea of bringing me together with the highly esteemed flautist Paul Meisen to make a CD; being at the beginning of my career with this label, I felt greatly honoured.

Contact was established with Meisen and we exchanged interesting ideas for new repertoire, but before anything concrete happened, he decided to end his performing career and devote himself solely to teaching. The idea was shelved and I never felt any particular need to take it up again under different conditions.

I must confess that, obvious though certain chamber-music combinations - and particularly flute and guitar - may be, they often seem to me to be unsophisticated, obliging, lacking in bite. In this I may well be influenced by my past activity as a saxophonist in a free jazz band. I simply need a certain level of energy, a certain boldness and liveliness in my interaction with other musicians, an extreme span of expression and dynamics.

The answer to this open question came quite by accident, when the flautist Andrea Lieberknecht, coincidentally a former graduate of Paul Meisen's Munich school, attracted my attention by virtue of her successes as a new teacher at the Hanover College of Music, where I myself taught. A relatively spontaneous afternoon of rehearsing together sufficed to form the idea for this recording and to turn our mutual reservations about this instrumental combination into enthusiasm.

It soon became clear that we wanted to focus on the most exciting tonal works of the twentieth century, but would avoid certain omnipresent drawcards which already dominate the repertoire for the flute and guitar.

I had long felt that the Serenade by Willy Burkhard was performed far too seldom. Writing for the guitar without being able to play it oneself is known to be difficult, so it is all the more surprising that Burkhard wrote so capably and idiomatically in this, his only piece for the instrument. In the subjects of the individual movements, he deliberately played with the seemingly innocuous instrumental combination in subtle, profound irony.

His Swiss compatriot and contemporary Hans Haug likewise used dark undertones, but his compositional language, with its dodecaphonic echoes, seemed far less accessible to us. Although he used the guitar in various works, his treatment of the instrument in the Capriccio is rather unsure and inadequate, so that special effort was needed to render it successfully, but the incomparably more opulent flute part and the lasting depth and inventive energy of the music more than compensated us for our trouble.

Placed in deliberate contrast, the Sonatina by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco is more of a "standard work". The inexhaustible naturalness of its melodic inventiveness combines with relaxed sureness in formal and instrumental treatment. Castelnuovo-Tedesco was accustomed to writing for the guitar in an orchestral manner, while he freely exploited the whole spectrum of the flute's tonal virtuosity to serve the exuberance of the music.

Our big discovery was Polydiaphonie by Eugène Bozza, a composer who is known to all wind players for a multitude of markedly virtuosic and instrument-specific works, but who wrote little for the guitar.

The listener is immediately struck by three aspects in this extremely seldom heard composition: its apparently complete lack of form, the relative "modernity" of its tonal language in comparison with other works by the same composer and the unexpectedly skilful guitar writing. Although the flute undoubtedly plays the leading role, the richness and finesse of the guitar part alone would be worthy of a solo concerto. The music develops in improvisatory manner, but the marvellously unpredictable way in which the two instruments interact results in an uninterrupted, natural flow.

In order to set this rather "free" work in a formal framework, we follow it up with the Serenade by Joaquín Rodrigo, which is written very compactly and almost simplistically in the unmistakable tradition of de Falla. It is in the nature of this tonal language that the work tends to have been composed "against" the flute; that, together with the very characteristic guitar writing, results in a specific expressive charm.

It was immediately clear to us that the relatively short Distribuição de Flores of Villa-Lobos, likewise his only work for this instrumental combination, was perfect to follow Rodrigo and concluded the programme on a conciliatory but also open and slightly mysterious final note.

The idea of bringing out the exotic, jungle-like quality of this music to special advantage by using the bass flute was too tempting to resist.

On completing this recording I became aware of how much good music full of vital chamber-musical interaction exists for the flute and guitar - something I had overlooked for so many years. There is a time for everything; I look forward to our sequel featuring music of the nineteenth century.

Frank Bungarten
Translation: J & M Berridge

Andrea Lieberknecht was born in 1965 in Augsburg. She studied music under Professor Paul Meisen at the academy of music in Munich. In 1988, even before finishing her studies, she became the soloist flute player with the Munich Radio Orchester. Three years later she changed to the same position in The West German Radio Symphony Orchester in Cologne. As a soloist and member of a chamber music group, with the ARCIS Quintett and with her pianist, Jan Philip Schulze, she has won many national and international competitions: i.e., the international music competition "Prager Frühling" in 1991, the International Flute Competition Kobe in 1993, the German Music Competition in 1996, the ARD-Competition and the international chamber music competitions in Colmar, Trapani and Belgrad.
Since then, recitals, solo concerts and chamber music concerts with well-known musicians, have taken her around the world. She has played solo concerts and chamber music concerts at international festivals such as The Ansbacher Bachwochen, The Rheingaufestival, The Schleswig-Holstein-Festival, festivals in Iida and Hamamatsu in Japan, and The Glasbeni September Maribor in Slovenia. Moreover, during the years 1993 to 1996, she was the solo flute player at The Richard-Wagner-Festival in Bayreuth. In Germany, she has given flute concerts with The Cologne Radio Symphony Orchester, The Munich Symphonists, as well as with the State Philharmony of Rheinland-Palatinate, The Augsburg Philharmonists, The Northwest German Philharmony and various chamber music orchesters.

Numerous compact disc recordings with solo and chamber music, some of them prize-winning, document her versatile artistic activity.
She taught at the academy of music in Cologne from 1996 to 1999. Besides her orchestra engagements, she has been a flute professor at the academy of music in Hannover since the winter semester of 1999. She is regularly asked to be a jury member at flute competitions and she teaches master classes in Europe, Japan and Australia.