Project Paloma III - Second World War Masterpieces for flute & piano The Netherlands Emily Beynon & Andrew West

• Marius Flothuis (1914 - 2001): Flothuis Sonata:
• 1 Flothuis: Flothuis Sonata: I Cadenza 01:41
• 2 Flothuis: Flothuis Sonata: II Sonatina 03:29
• 3 Flothuis: Flothuis Sonata: III Lamento 02:06
• 4 Flothuis: Flothuis Sonata: IV Rondo alla Francese 02:43
• Willem Andriessen (1887 - 1964): Andriessen Praeludium:
• 5 Andriessen: Andriessen Praeludium 03:09
• Marius Flothuis: Flothuis Aubade:
• 6 Flothuis: Flothuis Aubade 03:17
• Rudolf Escher (1912 - 1980): Escher Habanera:
• 7 Escher: Escher Habanera 03:55
• Leo Smit (1900 - 1943): Smit Sonata:
• 8 Smit: Smit Sonata: I Allegro 03:15
• 9 Smit: Smit Sonata: II Lento 04:37
• 10 Smit: Smit Sonata: III Allegro moderato 04:55
• Hans Osieck (1910 - 2000): Varsovi Accuse:
• 11 Osieck: Varsovi Accuse 04:36
• Dick Kattenburg (1919 - 1944): Kattenburg Piece pour flute et piano:
• 12 Kattenburg: Kattenburg Piece pour flute et piano 04:09
• Total Runtime 41:52

Info for Project Paloma III - Second World War Masterpieces for flute & piano The Netherlands

The darkness of the Second World War affected composers in different ways; this collection of works from the Netherlands shows some confronting it head-on, and others choosing musical forms that appear to look aslant at its horror - though none remained untouched by it. Smit and Kattenburg both died in the camps, just two of the 102,000 Jewish, Sinti and Roma victims from the Netherlands who are known to have been killed.

Marius Flothuis wrote both his Sonata da Camera (1943) and Aubade (1944) in Nazi camps. Much of the Sonata retains a neo-Classical detachment, but the Lamento at its heart shows the composer’s pain, while the purity of the Aubade offers the hope of a new dawn.

Begun in 1939, the three movements of Leo Smit’s powerful Sonata reflect the increasing despair of his own experience; the tragic slow movement from February 1943, shortly before he was deported.

Hans Osieck’s mazurka, Varsovie accuse (1946), marked “slow, sorrowful and sinister”, is heavy with the misery of the Warsaw Ghetto; it casts the youthful exuberance of Dick Kattenburg’s Pièce (1939) in a terrible new light, for by the time Osieck wrote this work, the 24 year old Kattenburg had been murdered in Auschwitz. Even the lush Romanticism of Andriessen’s Praeludium (1942) is marked “with sadness”, and Escher’s haunting Habanera (1945) is but a ghostly flicker of how it might have sounded before the war.

Emily Beynon, flute
Andrew West, piano

Emily Beynon
has been principal flute of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Amsterdam for more than 25 years.

Born in Wales, Emily Beynon began her flute studies as a junior at the Royal College of Music with Margaret Ogonovsky and then went on to study with William Bennett at the Royal Academy and with Alain Marion in Paris.

Equally at home in front of the orchestra as in its midst, Emily has performed as concerto soloist with, amongst others, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, BBC Orchestras, NHK Symphony, the Vienna, Prague, Netherlands and English Chamber Orchestras and the Academy of St.Martin-in-the-Fields.

As a chamber musician she works regularly with her sister, the harpist, Catherine Beynon and the pianist, Andrew West. She is frequently heard on the radio and has featured in several television documentaries. She has made 12 concerto/recital albums to date, the most recent being the first of a series of 5 Project Paloma discs with Andrew West, featuring masterworks for flute and piano from the Second World War.

Emily is an enthusiastic protagonist of new music and has had many new works written for her by composers such as John Woolrich, Sally Beamish, Jonathan Dove, Errollyn Wallen, Roxanna Panufnik and Maarten Ornstein.

A passionate and dedicated teacher, Emily is regularly invited to give masterclasses all over the world. From 2009 – 2021, she was Artistic leader of the Netherlands Flute Academy. At the start of the 2020 pandemic, Emily established a YouTube channel with video tutorials on technical aspects of playing and various orchestral repertoire solos.

Andrew West
has developed partnerships with many of the country’s leading singers and instrumentalists.

Andrew received the inaugural Gerald Moore Award for Accompanists, and for several years he acted as official accompanist to the Steans Institute for Singers at the Ravinia Festival in Chicago.

He has given recitals and recorded with Emma Bell (a CD of lieder by Strauss, Marx and Bruno Walter), Alice Coote, James Gilchrist, Hakan Vramsmo and Roderick Williams. He also appears regularly with Mark Padmore; their concerts together have included Mark Padmore’s debut Wigmore Hall recital, and further recitals in Paris and New York.

He is one of the artistic directors of the Nuremberg International Chamber Music Festival, now in its sixth year, which presents English song unfamiliar to local audiences as well as more traditional repertoire. Highlights have included Tippett songs with Mark Padmore and Britten’s opera Noye’s Fludde performed in a circus tent in Nuremberg Zoo.

He has a longstanding collaboration with flautist Emily Beynon, with whom he has appeared at the BBC Chamber Music Proms and the Edinburgh International Festival

As a duo pianist he appeared recently at the City of London and Cheltenham Festivals with pianist Cedric Tiberghien. He is also closely involved with the Michael Clark Dance Company Stravinsky Project, performing the two-piano version ofThe Rite of Spring with Philip Moore, and in a new production of Les Noces when the company returned to the Barbican Centre earlier this month.

Andrew West read English at Clare College, Cambridge before going on to study with Christopher Elton and John Streets at the Royal Academy of Music, where he is now professor of Accompaniment and Chamber Music. In 2019 he was awarded the prestigious Fellowship of the Royal Academy (FRAM).

Booklet for Project Paloma III - Second World War Masterpieces for flute & piano The Netherlands