Flutist Jeffrey Cohan

COHAN'S VIRTUOSITY SHINES IN FEAST OF FLUTES RECITAL FOR CREATIVE ARTS SERIES

Flutist Jeffrey Cohan's Jan. 8 recital in Santa Rosa’s Resurrection Parish was a combination of history, lecture and feats of virtuosity. An entire concert of unaccompanied flute might seem musically thin or missing something until Mr. Cohan plays, and then the realization comes that any other instrumental accompaniment would cover up the tiny nuances of interpretation and brilliant flashes of technique that made this concert so alive.

From a slender stick of hollow wood pierced with a few holes, Mr. Cohan pulled the Psalm 68 from the piece Der Fluyten Lust-hof by Jacob van Eyck as though it were a ribbon of sound that had always been there and all Mr. Cohan had to do was release it. That was how effortlessly he made it appear.

He often changed flutes, discussing and showing the difference in size, pitch and timbre of the different Renaissance instruments. There was a Tenor flute in D made by Filadelfio Puglisi of Florence, for the piece Giovanni Bassano’s Ricercata Primo, from Ricercate, Passaggi et Cadentie, a bass flute in G made by Peter Noy, modeled after a Bass Renaissance flute, on which Mr. Cohan played another piece by Bassano, and a great bass flute in D made by Barbara Stanley. On this last he played Psalm 1, from Der Fluyten Lust-hof of Van Eyck.

All of these pieces were sensitively played with a mastery of super long phrases all on one breath, keeping the melodic line with all its lacy embellishments unbroken. Invisible to the audience of 28 were the years of special breathing exercises that supported this feat. His coordination between the tonguing and the pitch change were so fast and so accurate that he appeared in the Bassano pieces to be articulating a trill.

A beginning flutist learns to coordinate the tongue and the fingers so that the end of one note doesn't slop over into the next, and with time a student can make clean articulation and differentiate between short staccato notes and hooked together, slurred notes. Advanced students learn special tricks of tonguing that allow them to articulate very quickly, but the fingers have to move in exact lock step with each and every note with no spill over. This is all well and good until the articulated notes are lightning fast and the composer has cleverly tucked them in between the long notes of the melody. These ornamentations are difficult enough on a modern flute, but Mr. Cohan tossed them off on simple keyless flutes as the frosting they are, never letting his audience lose track of the underlying forward thrust of the melodic line.

Mr. Cohan introduced each instrument with flute developmental history, and his explanations were clear, accurate and avoided technical terms and numbers while conveying essential information. He explained the difference between the straight sided (cylindrical) Renaissance flutes and the tapered (conical) Baroque flutes.

The artist then left the Renaissance age, introducing the first Baroque flute, a Hotteterre style instrument crafted by Rudolf Tutz. When he played Echos, from Prémier Livre de Pièces pour la Flûte Traversière, Op. 2, he surprised listeners with another technical feat, done with such sensitivity that his musicianship was never allowed to take a back seat to his artistry. This piece required tiny pianissimo sounds echoing the melodic fragments. It was so convincing that the echoes gave the clear impression that there was another flute player on a far away hill or at least in another room.

The Friederich von Huene Baroque flute, inspired by a Rottenburgh original, was chosen for the four-movement Bach Partita in A Minor, BWV 1013. The Baroque period and Bach in particular was free of the more divisional, more or less stepwise concepts of how a melody should be decorated. In this Partita there are greater jumps between the notes in the ornamentation, and the skips in the arpeggios became larger and give a completely different texture to the notes surrounding the strong low notes of the melodic line. Here Mr. Cohan took tasteful, slight rubato liberties with the tempo to keep the harmonic excitement pushing toward the resolution of each phrase, and reached the musical essence of the piece and kept it alive no matter where the arpeggiated flights took him.

Next the performer described the different woods used in flute making and how musical tastes changed through history. Cherry, pear and other fruit woods were favored by the medieval flute makers, their softer sounds being preferred over boxwood and especially over ebony, grenadilla and cocus. The last woods produced progressively more powerful and strident tones.

Out of the order in the program, Mr. Cohan next played Gigue en Rondeau from Recueil de Pieces by Michel Blavet, using a boxwood and ivory Baroque flute. In addition to the flowing, graceful arpeggios, offset by the powerful low notes, he consistently demonstrated a remarkable control of dynamics. His pure, free high notes faded gradually to nothingness, invisibly supported by his outstanding breath control. On another Rottenburgh inspired flute, this time made by Tutz, Mr. Cohan played Telemann’s E Minor Fantasie Nr. 8. In this piece, Cohan achieved a strange effect with several notes that is difficult to describe. However he did it, it sounded rather like a few notes here and there were played backwards on an old tape recorder. It worked very well with the piece. He did it with some sort of precise articulation combined with extreme control of volume on each note on which it occurs. Amongst the entire finger blitz, it was impressive.

These works were performed flawlessly from memory.

From the Medieval pieces on through until the modern flute, Mr. Cohan used a gentle vibrato created by a fluttering of his fingers over the holes of the flute, enhancing the emotional impact of the longer melody notes. He didn't use a breath or diaphragm vibrato until he played the modern silver Böhm flute at the end of the concert.

In the preparation for the Quantz pieces, two Cappricios from Caprices et autres Pièces, Mr. Cohan provided a glimpse of the court of Fredrick the Great. While explaining Quantz's many innovations in flute construction and the lowering of the standard pitch to be flute-friendly, Mr. Cohan neglected to mention that Quantz was actually Frederick the Great's flute teacher and that most of the music Quantz wrote was for his royal pupil. This is totally inconsequential, however, and all such thoughts were quickly blown away by the sheer virtuosity of the Quantz Cappricios.

During the intermission, the audience viewed the instruments up close on the stage, and there were flutes that most of us had only read about or seen pictures. The Quantz flute with its two keys, one for D Sharp and one for E Flat, was special. Made by Tutz after a flute in the Library of Congress, it required, as did all of the flutes played by Mr. Cohan from the Medieval on through until the modern Böhm flute, a special change of fingering for various notes. These changes varied from one type of flute to another and between individual examples within an era or style. When one contemplates the speed with which Mr. Cohan’s plays leaps, jumps, runs and trills between notes, with flutes that have their own fingering peculiarities, the artistic effect is palpable.

A quick giggle from the audience was the response to the name of the composer of the next piece, played on a flute sporting six keys and made by Richard Potter in 1785. It might possibly have been a Cappricio by Stamitz, but Ms. Cohan is convinced it was actually written by Joseph Tacet. There were no opportunities for a "tacit" measure rest for the performer, however, as the Cappricio rushed and flowed and delighted us.

Another flute made by Tutz, a six keyed instrument copied from a flute of Gottlieb Heinrich Grenser, was chosen to astound us with a piece by Kuhlau. Kuhlau is often called the Beethoven of the flute. I am convinced that every piece that played in this recital would have been the center show piece for any audience interested in the Baroque era. Kuhlau's Mich fliehen alle Freuden (Nel cor piu, from La Molinara by Paisello, Op. 10 No.11), started sweetly, only to give a theatrical shock when the cascading arpeggios leap and fly with seeming abandon, all completely under Mr. Cohan's control. The powerful, slurred octave effects rushed in the general torrent aided and abetted by articulated "black" notes. 64ths? 128ths? Definitely composed to wow an audience and it certainly did.

What could possibly follow the Kuhlau? With Köhler, of course. Ernesto Köhler was a composer of innumerable playful, playable etudes for amateurs. The selected piece, a Prelude from 1818, was written for no amateur. This tour de force let out all the stops in a dazzlement of arpeggios, leaping several octaves with supernatural ease.

The mid 1800's were great on songs with lots of variations. Joseph Kennedy wrote variations on Auld Lang Syne which appeared about 1845 in The Amateur's Souvenier magazine. In this age of parlor concerts and parlor tricks, musicians and magicians had ready, and probably the same, audiences. This showpiece features pitch "bending,” a not so subtle lowering and then usually returning to the base note. The effect here seems more a novelty than for the enhancement of a beautiful melody. It emphasizes how it is the only one of Mr. Cohan's enormous repertoire where the effects can overshadow the musicality of the piece. Mr. Cohan continually struggles with the work, allowing a beautiful melody to emerge, but then "bends" it without mercy.

Unfortunately the reviewer was unable to hear the Donjon Élégie-Étude, performed on a Meyer system eight-keyed flute. The Resurrection Church needed the space for another event and Mr. Cohan omitted the Donjon to save time, proceeding with a curious piece by Stuart Dempster and played on a modern silver flute. This is the only piece for which Mr. Cohan used a score. In this score there were words and a diagram, and as performer said, "no instructions whatsoever." So he improvised in the style he imagined the trombone-playing composer might have intended a flutist to play. There were atonal arpeggios floating off in one direction and landing in another. No lack of artistry or musicianship, but definitely a break from the past.

To further prove that Mr. Cohan can make musical sense out of nearly any relationship of notes, he played Bozza’s 1939 work Image, Op. 38. Free of any technical constraints, the artist combined his uncanny abilities with a modern flute on a piece that brought together pure sweet high notes of the medieval flutes and the rollicking Baroque arpeggios that flowed from key to key with harmonic abandonment. This was accompanied by even more body movement than any previous piece. From the Medieval music on, Mr. Cohan had swayed, rocked and used his eyebrows to accentuate, punctuate and emphasize where he was going musically. As the pieces progressed through the centuries, so did the intensity of his body movement.