Besson plays Mozart quartets

Michael Keelan: This is KBACH’s First Take, and I'm Michael Keelan. I'm talking with flutist Anna Besson about her new recording of Mozart's flute quartets. This comes quickly on the heels of a release of the Mozart concertos just last year, so it's been a big couple of years for Mozart projects. Welcome to First Take.

Anna Besson: Thanks for welcoming me.

Michael Keelan: The Mozart quartets and concertos were recorded on flutes either from the 18th century or in the style of an 18th century flute, which sounds very different from a modern flute. How much of that difference is the instrument, and how much is your approach to it?

Anna Besson: So it's very, very different from a modern flute, from the Boehm flute, as we can sometimes call it. So it's a wooden flute. It's conical, and not cylindrical like the Boehm flute, and it has eight keys. We know for sure that when Mozart write his concerto for flute and harp for the Duke of Guînes, Guînes is playing a English flute, probably a Potter—we're not sure of that, but it's probably a Potter flute—which has eight keys. That's why he writes until the low C, which is quite remarkable for the time. For the quartet, which is—they are written exactly the same time of the flute concertos, so I chose for my Grenser, which is a German model from the end of the 18th century with eight keys. And the keys are really helping the flute to sound even on every note, because the problem with the traverso is that we use strong fingerings and weak fingerings, so not every note can sound the same, and with the keys, it helps a lot to have a more even sound.

Michael Keelan: All right. And when you say traverso, that is the older style flute that's held horizontally.

Anna Besson: Exactly. It's exactly the same—let's say it's the grandmother of the modern flute. So the modern flute as we know it today with the Boehm system, which is fully chromatic, appears in about—at about 1830s, something like this, by Theobald Boehm, which is—he’s a genius, total genius. So he plays the early flutes with lots of keys, but they have nothing to do with the modern system. And he thinks, and he's right, that the flute are really not perfect, and to play in any tonality we want, with any sharps we want, any flats we want, we need a more perfected system. And so he invents this Boehm system. This system will be also adopted by the oboe and clarinet and bassoon, by the way. So that's what really like a revolution in the making of flutes. But like, for instance, in France, we will have to wait until 1860, when Tulou retires from the Conservatoire de Paris to accept this new system, because it was really a war between the flute players playing the ancient system, like the one I recorded with, and the modern flute of Boehm.

Michael Keelan: We'll just clarify for the listeners: Jean-Louis Tulou was the flute professor at the Paris Conservatoire, very influential position, and he had more conservative ideas about how flutes should be constructed, so he had to leave before things changed. How do the instruments of these quartets by Mozart relate to each other within the piece? You know, some composers at the time wrote concertante quartets where the writing is kind of soloistic for one or more instruments, and others wrote pieces where you could literally substitute one instrument for another—the oboe for the flute, for example. What is the relationship in these quartets?

Anna Besson: That's what I find a bit of a genius from Mozart's, because at this time—so the flute is really an amateur instrument, so everyone, basically, plays flute.

Michael Keelan: Yes, a very popular choice among amateurs to play at home.

Anna Besson: So every composer has written at some point music for the flute. Where Mozart is a bit different is that his very strong at putting a dialogue between the instruments. So it's always the flute having a dialogue with the violin, with the viola, with the cello, but it's—sometimes the flute is a soloist, but everyone in the quartet is a soloist in these quartets. And that makes a huge difference with the other quartet of the time.

Michael Keelan: Do you get the sense that all the quartets were written for the same type of player or approximately the same level of player, like a professional versus an amateur versus a virtuoso?

Anna Besson: Ah, that's a good question. We know who ordered one of the two quartets—the D major and the G major. He was—we say amateur éclairé, I don't know the term in English, let's say a very good amateur player.

Michael Keelan: Right, an enlightened amateur.

Anna Besson: And so he's from Holland, and he orders the two concertos—the G major and the D major—to him, and the two quartets. We're not sure he's a very strong player, because in the letters that Mozart writes about it, it's just he's not very happy to write this music. But we also know that he wrote them in Mannheim when he's there for a few months. And at the same time in Mannheim court, there is Wendling, and Wendling is a fantastic flute player. So did Mozart really write for De Jean, the amateur player, or knowing that flute could be played like Wendling? That's a big question. I don't know.

Michael Keelan: This is your ensemble, and you occasionally use ornaments or miniature cadenzas with both the violin and flute. What is your philosophy on adding those?

Anna Besson: Well, it depends. I try not to write too many of them, because they are really supposed to sound like I just improvise them, so the more I write, the less it sounds improvised. But yeah, let's say for a recording, we need to play many takes, and ideally the same takes, because otherwise it's just so difficult to put together at the end. So for this one, I asked my first violin, Louis, to write a little cadenza at the end of the D major first movement. I think it was something that the musicians would do a lot. When we read the treatises, for instance, when there is a cadenza at the end of a movement, it's clear that the composers don't want a long cadenza. It should be the length of one breath for a woodwind. But if we read the critics at the time, they all say, "Well, when the musician played the cadenza, it was a whole new piece." So I think it's both historical to play a short cadenza, or either something very long with a virtuosity and, etc., because both of them were really practiced at the time. But yeah, so to answer probably the question, I wrote the one I decided for the quartet, but I performed them lately, like two weeks ago, and they were different.

Michael Keelan: In English, we say "lead-in" for the short cadenza, in German it's Eingang, but I don't know what it is in French.

Anna Besson: Un pont. A bridge, kind of a bridge, so we say on fait un pont.

Michael Keelan: Un pont, I learned something today. I compliment you also on how superb your intonation is. Not everyone who plays these older flutes is able to play so well in tune, so it sounds like a silly question, but how do you manage that?

Anna Besson: Ah, well, that's what I say to my students, actually. I used to do like many of us do, it's to say, "Let's see before playing how much in good shape I am." The problem is that by doing this, we let a huge percentage of our playing decide if it's going to be good or not. But if we take the problem in the opposite way and we decide that we know exactly the sound we want before playing, the quality of articulation we want, and also where the note is—so really hearing it before—there's no reason that the note wouldn't sound the way we want. And that's something I really try to have whenever I play, it's to hear before I play. It's never random. It cannot be random. Before I play, I know the sound I want, I know the intonation I want, the articulation I want. And there is also something helping a lot, it's harmony. We should know for every note where we stand in the harmony. So if it's a third, it's going to be a small third, if it's a fifth, it has to be pure, etc. So it's both things really helping me in playing the most in tune I can.

Michael Keelan: Yes, so referring to the musical intervals or distances there. How much would a modern flutist even be able to play on one of these older instruments without additional training? So the answer for a historical keyboard or stringed instrument is quite a lot, but is that even true of the flute?

Anna Besson: Aha, yeah, well. I come from the modern flute, so let's say I've been playing the early flutes for—it's been almost 20 years now. And if I'm honest, I'm still learning a lot today. I mean, I read treatises, I forget them, I reread them through, and I discover new things I haven't understood the first time, and then I keep reading articles and discovering every day. So let's say it's never finished in a way. So if someone wants now to take a Baroque flute, if he's a really good modern flute player, probably the sound will be already very good. But for all the rest, we need to learn a whole new thing, like articulation. In the modern flute, we have like basically three: the simple tonguing, single tonguing, which is tu-tu-tu-tu-tu, the double tonguing in modern flute tu-ka-tu-ka-tu-ka, and the triple tonguing tu-tu-ka-tu-tu-ka. On the early flutes, the wooden flute, we have so many more articulations, so much more. So we could use the modern articulation on the wooden flute, but it wouldn't sound historical, and even the wood, let's say, wouldn't react the same as it react when we really use the proper articulations invented for these instruments. So a good flutist would be, I think, a very good flutist in any flute, but let me be honest, if we open the door of early music practice, it has to be open widely and to accept that it's a never-ending learning.

Michael Keelan: You teach at both the Brussels and Amsterdam Conservatories. How long of a commute, how long of a journey is that between them?

Anna Besson: It's three hours, I think. Maybe a bit less. Well, from where I live, it's three hours with a train. From Brussels, it should be two hours and a half to reach Amsterdam.

Michael Keelan: And speaking of travel, you mentioned that you first played these Mozart flute quartets in Egypt. Can you tell us that story?

Anna Besson: Oh, yeah. So I was 15, and my godfather, he's a cellist, and so I was born in the south of France, in Perpignan, which is a small city near Spain. And so I was fond of Egypt at this time, really fond. So I would take shoe boxes and imagine like a painting or something like a theater piece with the pyramids and the Sphinx, and really, I still know actually all the gods. I was really into this Egypt ancient story. And so when my godfather told me, "Look, I have this proposal to play with a quartet, any music, on a cruise ship in Egypt. Would you join me, because I know how much you love Egypt?" And I said, "Of course." So it was a week, I think it was December, it was between Christmas and New Year's Eve. And for a week, I played every night some of the Mozart quartets, and it was just fantastic memory, because it's really linked to the temples and everything I discovered then, and this music that I love very much. The main difference—well, I was very young, obviously—but I played them on the modern flute, and it's much more difficult for me now to play a repertoire which is not written for the right flute. So now if I would have to take my modern flute and play Mozart, I would feel like—I think I wanted to make a translation of un éléphant dans un magasin de porcelaine, but I don't know the word porcelaine. It's like I would feel like a huge elephant entering a shop with very delicate things.

Michael Keelan: Yeah, in a porcelain shop, exactly. This is an absolutely beautiful album of the Mozart Flute Quartets. Anna Besson, the flutist, and A Nocte Temporis, her ensemble. Thanks so much for talking with us.

Anna Besson: Thank you very much.