Word: fluted
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...Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton and Pepys celebrated its endearing combination of solemnity and sweetness, and King Henry VIII was an avid noodler on his collection of 77 recorders. As orchestras grew larger, however, the gentle voice of the recorder was replaced by the stronger tones of the transverse flute. Then, in the early 1920s, an English musician, Arnold Dolmetsch, began making and playing recorders, and started a revival that spread slowly to Germany, Switzerland, The Netherlands...
...noises into the staccato piano theme: the sound of traffic on the street outside, a patrician English girl chattering nervously, a chanteuse, a coloratura, a boy soprano, Florence Foster Jenkins murdering high D at the end of the Queen of the Night's aria from The Magic Flute. Oddly but irresistibly, they add up to a cry from the heart...
GLUCK: ORFEO ED EURIDICE (RCA Victor; 3 LPs). An opera for people who do not like singing, Orfeo is long on dances, and its best-known aria (in the Dance of the Blessed Spirits) is reserved for a flute. Renato Fasano and the Virtuosi di Roma give a pastel but translucent orchestral performance, almost otherworldly, as befits the score. Unfortunately, the singers are a bit too bloodless, even the promising young mezzo, Shirley Verrett, who sings Orfeo...
...show (especially in contrast to the corny folk music that accompanied the first set of dances). Pianist Peter Larson has a good feel for the consonances of large chords and his playing is always solid, though sometimes a little too standard. Steve Brown plays flexibly on sax and flute, and some of his choruses, especially the uninterrupted fast passages, are quite imaginative. Bruce Vermeulen plays solid jazz bass, and Hayden Duggan on drums provides the most driving, emotional playing of the group...
...with its macabre, Gesualdo-like modulations (superbly sung in the production); Phedre's pathetic scena, "Cruella mere des amours": the Act IV Hippolyte-Aricie duet, "Ah! fautil e un jour," with its revealing major-minor key shifts, and Aricie's closing "Nightingale Aria," one of the first soprano vs. flute bel canto trials...