By David McGee
NARRATIVE: MUSIC BY WOMEN COMPOSERS FOR FLUTE AND PIANO
Virginia Broffitt Kunzer & Tammie Walker
MSR Classics
Virginia Broffitt Kunzer
Recent years have brought about a welcome discovery and/or rediscovery of formidable but long neglected female composers, Florence Price and Amy Beach being but two of the most prominent whose compositions have found avid followings in the classical world in the wake of fresh interpretations by young artists. The year 2023 alone yielded star cellist and Opus Klassik laureate Raphaela Gromes’s compelling Femmes, two discs’ worth of music by female composers representing more than nine centuries of music history (and a high ranking in the Deep Roots Elite Half-Hundred of 2023). Later in the year MSR Classics issued the sublime Narrative: Music by Women Composers for Flute and Piano, featuring Virginia Broffitt Kunzer on flute and Tammie Walker on piano. The 16 tracks—some with multiple parts—showcase the works of artists born between 1814 and 1970, with the most recognizable name among them arguably being Ms. Beach (1867-1944), who is represented by a beautiful rendering of her tender “Three Browning Songs, Op. 44,” arranged by Ms. Kunzer in an intriguing way in which her delicate flute solos highlight the cadences in Robert Browning’s poems, most affectingly in the yearning she evokes in both the somber and soaring parts of the third Browning song, “I send my heart up to thee,” as Walker shadows her on piano with expressive but tastefully subdued lyricism.
‘Three Browning Songs: I. The year’s at the spring, composed by Amy Beach, performed by Virginia Broffitt Kunzer (flute) and Tammie Walker (piano), from Narrative
Although the album as a whole could accurately be described as mellow, in a New Age way, it’s not all meditative musings. The delightful “Allegro Rustico” and “Sounds of the Forest,” both by Sofia Gubaidulina (b. 1931) are propelled across nearly nine minutes by energetic bursts of the flute’s flittering notes and all sorts of piano pyrotechnics from muscular arpeggios and rumbling left-hand to ostinato right-hand punctuations, all evoking the panoply of life animating the natural world. The personalities, if you will, of the two instruments at work here are pleasingly drawn out in the shifting moods of Delphine von Schauroth’s (1814-1887) highly Romantic 17-minute “Sechs Lieder ohne Worte” in which the balance, the “conversation,” so to speak, between the piano and flute, the wind and the percussive personalities, creates captivating emotional expressiveness, especially when the flute soars high and far over the piano’s rippling, sometimes protesting, voice.
‘D’un matin de printemps,’ composed by Lili Boulanger, performed by Virginia Broffitt Kunzer (flute) and Tammie Walker (piano), from Narrative
In the three-part “Birds of Paradise” by Israeli-American composer Shulamit Ran (b. 1949), the instruments conspire to deliver exactly what each movement describes: “Sparking, energetic” (I), “With mystery and awe, slow and flexible”(II), “Brilliant, articulate, propulsive” (III). This work is really the flutist’s show, as Ms. Kunzer brings forth all manner of sonic effects, enumerated in Marian Wilson Kimber’s liner notes as “tongued percussive effects, key clicks, explosive jet whistle calls, bent pitches, and whistle tones created through modifications to the player’s projection of air.” Equally feisty, albeit shorter, Lili Boulanger’s (1893-1918) “D’un matin du printemps” (“Of a spring morning”) finds the musicians in a celebratory mood appropriate to the time of the season, chasing each other around the arrangement at points, teasing, darting, diving, taking a breath and flittering away again in the disc’s most boldly humorous moments.
‘Fanmi Imèn,’ composed by Valerie Coleman, performed by Virginia Broffitt Kunzer (flute) and Tammie Walker (piano), from Narrative
In many ways the most challenging composition here is that of the estimable Valerie Coleman (b. 1970), for whom we have to thank for a number of classically oriented projects in recent years, most notably the Grammy nominated and much honored woodwind quintet Imani Winds. Her “Fanmi Imèn,” the Haitian Creole translation of the title of Maya Angelou’s poem “Human Family” (reproduced in the liner booklet), which inspired Coleman’s work and her goal to suggest in musical terms both the diversity and commonality of the poem’s refrain, “we are more alike, my friends, than we are unlike.” At slightly under eight minutes, “Fanmi Imèn” is quite the journey, from the keening flute solo in the first few measures, with the piano adding spare, impressionistic punctuation to a Middle Eastern affect before the arrangement moves on and through a flamenco conte jondo (“deep songs”) to a lively finale of spirited African-inspired rhythms requiring some dexterous maneuvering by both instruments, leading to a rousing but genial flute-piano contretemps as the big finish. In the end, to know Narrative is to love it, as its depth, musically and conceptually, rewards repeat listenings.
