Benoit, Peter

Benoit, Peter – Symfonisch gedicht voor fluit en orkest (piano reduction & part)

Peter Benoit (Harelbeke, 17 augustus 1834 – Antwerpen, 8 maart 1901)

For more information about the piece read the preface of the full score:

The number of flute concertos from the nineteenth century is rather restricted: while after the technical innovations of Theobald Boehm the new techniques and expressive capacities of the instrument were utilized to the fullest embedded in orchestral music, the flute kept struggling to manifest itself as a concertante solo instrument in its own right. This was mainly due to the fact that it was diffi- cult to let the orchestra completely expand itself without interfer- ing with the flute sound. Furthermore the timbre of the flute always runs the risk of saturating the sense of hearing rather rapidly. In his Nouveau traité d’instrumentation (1885) François-Auguste Gevaert therefore wrote: ‘Except for the music written by virtu- oso composers there is for the flute a conspicuous paucity of great concert solos with accompaniment by the orchestra. (…) The nat- ural place of the flutes is in the orchestra, both for concerts and for the lyric theatre.’And in the chapter ‘The orchestra associated with the instrumental solo’ in his Cours méthodique d’orchestra- tion (1890) Gevaert emphasizes that the possibilities of wind in- struments are generally not varied enough ‘to hold the scene for a long time in their own right; wind instruments are suited only for rather short pieces, conceived in a vocal style, romances or songs without words.’ And finally: ‘The entrance of a flute, of an oboe, of a bassoon after a pompous tutti is absolutely grotesque’. …

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