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5 Cambridge Recorder Orchestral
5 Cambridge Recorder Orchestral
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When Claudio Monteverdi composed the music for Orfeo, a new opera
to be presented at the Mantuan court as part of the 1607 Carnival
celebrations, he made use of some forty-five different ínstruments.!
Many appeared only briefly, to add colour to a particular number.
Typical of these was the sopranino recorder that, with strings, lutes,
harpsichord and harp, imparted a glittering sound to the Act I pastoral
chorus 'Lasciate i monti'. Orfeo was simuItaneously a progressive and
an old-fashioned work. The relatively specific nature of its instrumen-
tation exemplified a new trend, but its diversity of instrumental
timbres belonged to renaissance tradition. By 1643, when Monteverdi
wrote L'incoronazione di Poppea for a Venetian opera house, the more
restricted orchestral palette he employed reflected one of the funda-
mental developments of the baroque era: the transition from a plethora
of instrumental sonorities to a more standardised ensemble, based on
the homogeneous sound of strings and continuo.
Ten years after the premiare of L'incoronazione di Poppea, the young
musician Jean-Baptiste Lully entered the service of Louis XIV of France
as an instrumental composer and director. Under his influence, strings
and continuo were consolidated as the basis of the baroque orchestra.
His elite creation, the 'petite bande' (also known as the 'violons du
cabinet'), and the larger 'vingt-quatre violons du roy' which he
controlled from 1664, revolutionised the concept of orchestral music
and set new standards of player competence and musical discipline. At
much the same time, and possibly spurred by the growing dominance
of the strings, professional wind players at the French court began a
process of instrument modification. Structural changes, made by
members of the Hotteterre, Philidor and Chédeville families, trans-
formed the woodwind instruments of the renaissance band into the
new baroque oboés, bassoons, flutes and recorders. These were quickly
adopted throughout Europe. French orchestras of the late seventeenth
century routinely included oboes and bassoons. As other centres
91
92 Adrienne Simpson
Plate 26 This is a greatly enlarged small detail of a copperplate engraving of the first
performance of Antonio Lotti's Teofane in the new Dresden opera house in 1719, part
of the marriage festivities for Frederick August 11and Maria Josepha. It shows half of
the splendid Dresden orchestra around the harpsichord (just seen on the lower right of
the plate), and includes at the bottom left three (?treble) recorders, two playing and one
resting. In front of and beyond the two prominent theorboes are what may be bass
recorders, and beyond them, before the start of a large section of violins, there are two
transverse flutes. These are roughly the forces required for Heinichen's concertos (see
p. 113). One of the flautists on this occasion may have been Pierre-Gabriel Buffardín,
Quantz's teacher, and one of the violinists Francesco Maria Veracini, who wrote
excellent solo sonatas for violin or flauta. The recorders would presumably have been
played by Dresden oboists of the time such as François La Riche, [ohann Christian
Richter and Peter Glõsch. From Douglas Alton Smith, 'Sylvius Leopold Weiss' (lutenist
and theorbo player), Early Music 8/1 (Ian, 1980), p. 49.
The orchestral.recorder97
..During the early eighteenth century the rivalry between recorder and
flute was as apparent in Italy as elsewhere in Europe. Until approxi-
mately 1725 the designation 'flauto' in a Vivaldi score alwaysrefers to
recorder. Thereafter,' he shows more interest in· the increasingly
popular transverse flute. Some of the concertos in his Op. ·10collection
began life ·as recorder works. By the time they reachedpublícationín
1729/30 they had been reassigned to the flute, in an obvious conces-
sion tochangíngtaste (see p. 108).
The 'later baroque period was dominated by the new instrumental
and vocal developments in Ita1y, and particularly by the widespread
fashion for Italian opera. One of the finest exponents of that genre was
Ceorge- Frideric Handel. In the operas he wrote for London audiences,
he used both transverse flutes and recorders, although he gives the
latter relatívely little to do. During his early· career in Italy he had
tended to usethe instrument conservatively, mainly doublíng the
víolín. In England, where he had some excellent players available to
him, he' employed it with greater flair. His recorder parts oftenparallel
the vocalline, moving in unison or in consonantthirdsand. sixths. At
other times voice and recorder imitate each other, or exchange melodic
fragments. As ín allltalianate vocal music with obbligato,the sense of
eompetítíon between singer and instrument is frequently present.
Of the seventeen operas Handel wrote between 1704 and 1726,
recorders .feature in eleven. 6In his first London opera, Rinaldo,
performed in 1711, sopranino and trebles play off stage, imitating
birdsong, in the aria 'Augelletti che cantate' from Act I scene .4.
According to the 1711 libretto this was set .ín 'A delightful Grove in
which the Birds are heard to sing, and are seen flying up and down'.
The scene caused a furore at the premíêre when live birds .were
released on to the stage. Rinaldo is an opera full of stage effect and
superficial brilliance. A more imaginative use of recorders can be
found in 'Senza procello ancora' from Act 11scene 4 of Poro (1731),
where they are combined with homs against a background of pedal
notes in ·the strings. The trio for two trebles and bass that introduces
the alto aria 'Puõ ben nascer' in Act I scene4 of Giustino(1736) is an
Italianate version of the French sommeil. Giustino is ploughingwhen
he 'is overcome by drowsiness. In the ensuing dream sequence his
elevation to Roman emperor is symbolically revealed. The recorders
play, characteristically, in the passage where Gíustíno is lulled to
sleep.
Handel's non-operatic works also contain delightful examples of the
orchestral use of recorders, as in the slow movement of bis, Dp.3 No. 1·
Concerto Grosso. Piping flauti piccoli add brilliance to the air andfirst
Gígúe from the G major Water Music suite:Acis and Galatea (1718) has
three arias that use recorders, not for their solo properties but for the
colour they impart when doubling the violin line: The most famous of
The otchestral.recorder 101
the three is the grotesque- love song for the giant Polyphemus, 'O
ruddier thanthe cherry'. Here the recorder not only illustratesthe pipe
that Polyphemus íntends to make and play, for,his beloved ,Galatea; but
continues the convention ofusing the instrument in love scenes.-Ithas
become usual to employ the sopranino in this aria, and although ·the
original scoring was undoubtedly fortreble, there iscertainly some-
thing irresistibly comic in the contrast between a lumberíng giantand
the stratospheric sound ofthe pipe he makes for.hístcapacíous throat"
.Although the numberof works featuring the recorder as an orchestral
instrument may seem impressive, it is essential to realise .that they
represent a very small part of each composer's output. Purcell, -for
example, used recorders more often than many of his contemporaries,
yet they appear only in seven of hisfifty operatic and theatrical scores,
three of his nine Welcome Odes, andthree outof seven-Bírthday Odes.
Of Bach's 200 surviving sacred cantatas, only nineteen have recorder
parts. Such statistics confirm that the recordar; like the flute, was used
sparingly in an orchestral context duríng the baroque -era, Oboes and
bassoons were the only woodwind instruments regularly added to the
basic baroqueorchestra of strings and.contínuo.vlt seems certain that
most of themusicians who played the .recorder orchestrally, at least ín
France and England, were primarilyemployed for theír expertise on
other instruments. '
Since oboes and recorders rarely play simultaneously in a score, it is
likely that many of the oboe players listed in inventories of the period
doubled on recorder, in' the same way that an oboist in a modem
orchestra does on cor anglaís." Several English -practitioners ,were
primarily . string players, including [ohn Banister the Younger and
Robert King who are assumed to have takenthe recorderparts. in two
of Purcell's Birthday Odes, Arise my Muse (1691) and Celebrate- this
Festival (1693).8 The ability to double on other instruments appears to
have been a common skill among musicians of the baroque period.
Despite the fine array of woodwínd required for Vivaldi's oratorio
Juditha Triumphans, for example, only one kind is heard ata time dn
the score, and it is almost certain that some of the performers. played
more than one instrumento
If further confirmation is needed, it canbe ·found byexamining the
membership lists for Handel's London opera orchestra.9 No specialist
recorder players ate listed in these, although the instrument was
clearly required in most of his operas. The situation for Handel was the
same as that which obtained in Purcell's day. Other ínstrumentalísts,
generally oboists, doubledon recorder. Peter LaTour, Jean .Christian
Kytch, Francesco Barsanti, [ohn Loeillet and Giuseppe Sammartini
were among the foreígn vírtuosí who made theír. living in- England,
primarily as oboists. All are known tohavealso.played ..the-recorder,
and all were ín the opera orchestra available to Handel at .varíoustimes,
102 Adrienne Simpson
between 1721 and 1738. Virtually every opera -Handel wrote during
that period makes use of the instrumento After 1738, recorders abruptly
vanish from his· scores - apart from an isolated and much later
example in Judas Maccabeus (1747). Sammartini left the opera
orchestra around 1738. Kytch died that year, and La Tour is presumed
to have done so as well. The inference is clear. It did not merit a place
in the orchestra on. its own account, but was a useful extra which some
players were able to offer. Today, when the recorder is more widely
played than any other instrument of the baroque period, it is salutary
to be .remínded that it was not nearly as important in its own day as
the twentieth-century recorder revival would lead us to believe.
The developments that led, gradually, to the relatively fixed -combi-
natíon- of instruments we describe as an orchestra today, were
pioneered 'Ín the opera theatres of Italy and at the French court. By
about 1740 the recorder had virtually ceased to have any part ín these.
Some writers consider that its disappearance from the orchestral
palette was due to its quiet sound.l'' This cannot be wholly true. When
matched with instruments of íts-own period the recorder carries rather
better than the baroque flute. The major cause of its demise was the
lackof nuance and dynamic flexibility that made it less suítable for the
more overtly expressive style of writing introduced into European
music in the mid-eighteenth century .
..Changes rarely happen overnight. Recorders did not fall out of use
immediately. There were still being made and playedtowards the end of
the eighteenth century. Burney, for example, reports hearing a recorder
player in Florence .ín 1770.11 Edgar Hunt has made outa persuasive case
for the 'flauti' that played the!Dance of the Blessed Spirits' in the
original score of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice'(1762) being recorders, and
examples of the recorder as an orchestral obbligato instrument with the
voice are occasionally found after that date.12 Paisiello used it briefly in
his opera n barbiere di Siviglia (1782), and it is possible that the 'small
flute' and '8th flute' specifications in Shield's The Farmer (1787)
referred to recorders. There was even some awareness of the instrument
among composers of the early nineteenth century. Rossini once owned
an elegant Italian treble recorder, veneered in tortoise-shell and inlaid
with gold andmother-of-pearl, although he probably regarded it as a
historical curiosity rather than as a practical ineans of musíc-makíng. 13,
Since the recorder revival of the twentieth century, the instrument
has again appeared very occasionally in orchestral scores. An example
is the small stage-band of recorders in Britten's opera A Midsummer
Night'sDream (1960). It makes a more notable contribution to the same
coinposer's opera, Noye's Fludde (1958),. which was written for
children and scored ,....in true baroque fashion - for a small concertino
section of professional players and a large ripieno group of young
amateurs (pl. 28). Two easy parts for descant recorders and one.for
The orchestral recorder 1Q3
Plate 27 Like Plate 15A this is another well-known picture from the Wallace
Collection, London, reproduced by their kind permission. Nicolas Lancret's Mademoi-
selle de Camargo Dancing"in her own open-air theatre, was painted about 1730 when
thís famous dancer was iwenty. There are similar pictures in the Hermitage at St
Petersburg (where she is shown in a red dress), Nantes and Potsdam. Whát is often
overlooked is the participation of the treble recorder in the dance band in thebushes,
along with violin, viola and bassoon, as well as the pipe and tabor on the left, Small
recorders may have remained part of the orchestral forces for ballet until well into the
eighteenth century. WB 32
Plate 28 Rehearsal in Orford Church for the first performance, which took place on
18 June 1958, of Benjamin Britten's Noye's Fludde. The photograph shows some of the
recorders - there were about thirty in all - including the professional Stanley Taylor
(upper left) who played the treble recorder solo part, with flutter-tonguing for the
cooing of the dove. The timpanist is James Blades. As everybody is playing, this may
be the storm section - 'The waves roll and crash, the wind (recorders) howls through
the rigging. At the height of the storm the ark rocks wildly and the animaIs panic. The
monkeys try to climb the rigging, a squirrel almost falIs overboard, but finalIy Noye
and his family calm the frightened animals. Above the hubbub of the storm rises the
hymn Eternal Father, strong to save, sung by Noye and alI the others in the ark. The
congregation joins in the second verse, and slowly the storm begins to abate' (from
libretto). Photograph by Kurt Hutton, Britten-Pears Library, Aldeburgh.
Notes
1. See Neal Zaslaw, 'Three notes on the early history of the orchestra', Historical
Performance 1/2 (1988), p. 63.
2. A list of PurcelI scores which include the recorder can be found in Walter
Bergmann, 'Henry PurcelI's use. of the recorder', Recorder and Music Magazine
1/11 (1965), pp. 333-5. (See ais o p. 88, note 18).
3. Privilêge for the Académie, see Jürgen Eppelsheim, Das Orchester in den Werken
[ean-Baptiste Lullys (Tutzing 1961), pp. 150,215.
4. For some further examples of Bach's orchestral use of the recorder see Edgar Hunt,
The Recorder and its Music, rev. edn (London 1977), pp. 77-81.
5. See David Lasocki's article on echo flutes in the Galpin Society [oumal 45 (1992),
pp. 59-66; also the discussion, by John Martin and others, in The Recorder
(Melbourne) 9 and 10 (1989), pp. 1-3 and 19-24 respectively, and David Lasocki,
'More on echo flutes' in the same joumal, 13 (1991), pp. 14-16. See also p. 117,
note 18.
The orchestral recorder 105
6. See the table in Winton Dean and Iohn Merrill Knapp, Handel's Operas: 17°4-:1726
(Oxford 1987), p. 636.. ,
7.0ccasional exceptions do occur; for example, in the duet 'Shepherds, shspherds
leave decoying' from Purcell's incidental music to King Arthur (1691) -where both
oboes and recorders are employed in the introduction. '
8. See Lasocki, 'Professional recorder playing in England: Part n - 1640-1740', Early
Music 10/2 (1982), pp. 184-7, for a more extensive díscussion about specialists on
other instruments doubling recorder when required. , '
9. See Donald Burrows, 'Handel's London theatre orchestra', Early Music 13/3 (1985),
particularly p. 355. ..'
10. For instance C. F. D. Schubart, Ideen zu einer Asthetik der Tonkunst (Vienna 1806),
p.209.
11. Charles Burney, Music, Men, and Manners in France and Italy, 1770, modo edn
(London 1969), p. 116.
12. Hunt, The Recorder and its Music, p. 88. ,
13. The recorder is in London's Victoria and Albert Museurn, item no. 1124-1869. '
Select bibliography
. ,'C.o,!
Books
James R. Anthony, French Baroque Music frotn Beaujoyeaulx to Rameau, rev.
edn (New York 1978)
Malcolm Boyd, Bacb. [London 1983) . , ". J
Winton Dean and John Merrill Knapp, Handel's Operas: 1704-1726 (Oxford
1987)
H. Wiley Hitchcock, Marc-Antoine Charpentier (Oxford 1990)
Edgar Hunt, The Recorder and its Music, rev. edn (London1977)
Iohn Manifold, 'The Amorous Flute (London 1948)
Richard Petzoldt, GeorgPhilipp Telemann (London 1974)
Michael Talbot, Vivaldi (London 1978)
Sir Jack Westrup,Purcell, rev. edn (London 1960)
Articles
Nicholas Anderson, 'Georg Philipp Telemann: a tercentenary reassessment',
Early Music 9/4 (1981), pp. 499-505
'Vivaldi - the priest impresario', Recorder and Music Magazine 3/10 (1971),
pp.360-2
Denis Amold, 'Monteverdi the instrumentalist', Recorder and Music Magazine
2/5 (1967), pp. 130-2
Janet E. Beat, 'Monteverdi and the opera orchestra of his time', The
Monteverdi Companion, ed. Denis Ameld and Nigel Fortune (London
1968), pp. 277-301
Walter Bergmann, 'Henry Purcell's use of the recorder', Becorder aiid Music
Magazine 1/11 (1965), pp. 333-5; reprinted, ibid. 7/12 (1983), pp.310:"'13
Donald Burrows, 'Handel's London theatre orchestra', Early Music 13/3
(1985), pp. 349-87,
David Lasocki, 'Professional recorder playing in England: Part 11-1640-1740',
Early Music 10/2 (1982), pp. 183-91
'Vivaldi and the recorder', The American Recorder 9 (1968), pp. 103-7
106 Adrienne Simpson
Douglas Macmillan, "The recorder in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries',. The Consort 39 (1983), pp. 489-97 _ ..
Hansjoachím Marx, 'The instrumentation of Handel's early.Italían works' ,
Early Music 16/4 (1988), pp. 496-505
Ioel Newman, 'Handel's use of the recorder', The American Recorder 5/4
(1964), pp. 4-:.9 .
Philippe Oboussier, 'The chapel of the Sun King', Music and Musicians 20/3
(November 1971), pp. 30-2
Hans-Joachim Schulze, 'Johann Sebastian Bach's orchestra: some unanswered
questions', Early Music 13/1 (1989), pp. 3-15
Eleanor Selfridge-Field, 'Vivaldi's esoteric instruments', Early Music 16/3
(1988), pp. 332-8
'Italian oratorio and the baroque orchestra', Early Music 16/4 (1988), pp.
506-13
CarolineWood, 'Orchestra ..and spectacle in the tragédie en musique.167;J-
1715: oraeIe, sommeil and tempéte', Proceedings of the RoyaJ Musical
Association. 108 (1981,",,2),pp. 25-46 .
Neal .Zaslaw, 'When is an orchestra not an orchestra?', Early Music 16i4
.. (1988), pp. 483-95
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