Christos Hatzis – Flute Concertos
Patrick Gallois; Thessaloniki State Symphony; Alexandre Myra
Naxos 8.573091
Released by Naxos on its Canadian Classics series, this CD offers the recorded premieres of two flute concertos by Christos Hatzis, one of Canada’s best-known living composers, as played by the celebrated French flutist Patrick Gallois and the Thessaloniki State Symphony. The first, Departures, is a memorial piece written in 2011, a time of personal loss for Hatzis and the year of Japan’s devastating tsunami and nuclear disasters. Hatzis is known for his use of multiple and eclectic influences, and here there are whiffs of Japanese melody, blues patterns, French impressionism and much more. In the first movement, the flute flutters deftly between traditional and extended sound worlds, with seamlessly woven interplay between soloist and orchestra. The orchestral playing in the third movement brings robust rhythms incisively to life.
Overscript, written in 1993 and revised in 2012, is described in the notes as a commentary on Bach’s Concerto in G Minor BWV 1056/1 for flute, strings and basso continuo. Bachophiles will know the root piece better either as the concerto for harpsichord in F minor or as the G minor violin concerto. Here we have a very different kind of piece, a kind of palimpset in which Hatzis superimposes his own music over Bach’s in fragmented format, making for some intriguing comparisons which the listener is invited to make. Under Alexandre Meyrat’s first-rate direction, the orchestra plays in lively and expressive fashion throughout, and Gallois is his usual elegant, musically effervescent and technically brilliant self.
