Marc Hantaï / Pierre Hantaï BACH Sonates pour Flûte et Clavecin

While I can’t claim to have heard every recording of JS Bach’s works for solo flute and harpsichord in the catalogue, I’ve listened to quite a few. Brothers Marc and Pierre Hantaï’s is the best I’ve come across.

This is of course a highly subjective statement. Well, yes and no. Favourites – such as those by Lisa Beznosiuk, Rachel Brown, Ashley Solomon, Emmanuel Pahud (on modern flute) and Hantaï’s master himself, Barthold Kuijken – exhibit a level of technical accomplishment and interpretative insight that is perfectly susceptible to critical analysis. What separates this recording from those is the extent to which the brothers embrace the music’s rhetoric while sounding less learnt than natural. Which is, you might counter, simply another very sophisticated use of oratory. Whatever. Start listening and you won’t be able to stop.

To focus on Marc for a moment and the odd man out, the Solo (Partita) for unaccompanied flute: the antique dances sway between speech and song, the articulation, the rhythmic and tonal shadings adumbrating harmonic progressions with absolute fluency. To bring Pierre into the picture, right from the opening Adagio of the E major Sonata there is a sense of luxuriant, almost divine peace and tranquillity which one finds again in the Largo of the B minor Sonata. It’s as much to do with the sensitivity of breath and touch as it is to do with the authentic instrument’s natural sonorities. Elsewhere, it is a lithe, détaché approach and tasteful ornamentation which so gently animates the faster movements. In short, this is playing of the greatest subtlety and discernment. (William Yeoman / Gramophone)

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