Great principal flutes - the Germans #7
Episode 7: Nicolet, Zöller, Blau, Redel, Haupt
This week Au coeur de l’orchestre looks at five of the great German orchestral flutists of the 20th century. In some fabulous recordings from the 50s to the 90s, we hear Aurèle Nicolet play CPE Bach, Karlheinz Zöller in Le Merle noir, Andras Blau in the Mozart Flute Quartet in D major, and Kurt Redel and Eckart Haupt in concertos by Telemann and Vivaldi. The podcast traces the orchestral careers of these players which of course includes reference to their years in the Berlin Philharmonic, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the Staatskapelle Dresden.
If you’re a new subscriber to the French Flute podcasts you can catch up with previous episodes in the series here. You can also read my posts on other topics on the Flutes Inspired page.
The play button below will take you to the podcast on the Radio France website. Once there, click on the pink > écouter button to listen.
My translation and notes for Ep. 7 begin below.
Au Coeur de l’Orchestre | At the Heart of the Orchestra
A Radio France Musique podcast series presented by Christian Merlin
Great principal flutes II—the Germans (episode 3 of 4)
Programme ident 00:00. Content commences 00:29
Presenter: Christian Merlin
Hello everyone, and welcome to At the Heart of the Orchestra. This is the third episode of my survey of great principal flutes. When it comes to the Germans (we've already looked at the Americans and the English), [you might think] I’d have a little more trouble finding solo personalities as big as those in France, the United States or Great Britain. Because for a long time in Germany, the [musical] culture was above all orchestral—in other words collective. It was a question of blending in rather than standing out.
At the Berlin Philharmonic, this was precisely the quality of Albert Harzer, principal flutist from 1910 to 1943 under [William] Furtwängler, and then under Hans-Peter Schmitt[-Isserstedt]. But in 1950, the Berliners felt the need to open up to a more soloistic, more individual style of playing, and engaged a very great artist, Aurèle Nicolet. Nicolet was Swiss, from Neuchâtel, born in 1926, who had trained in Zurich and in Paris with Marcel Moyse. This made him a harmonious synthesis of the German school and the French style.
Recording 1: 1:31 to 6:22
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
Concerto in G major, Presto
Aurèle Nicolet (flute)
Winterthur Symphony Orchestra
Conductor Victor Desarzens
Label: Association Jean-Pierre Rampal / Recorded 1955.
Aurèle Nicolet remained principal flautist with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for 10 years. He lived through the last years of Furtwängler, whom he revered, and the first years of [Herbert von] Karajan, whom he liked less. This was between 1950 and 1960, before he became both a soloist and a great teacher. When I say that I don't mean like Rampal, who tended to say to the student, "This is how you do it"; instead Nicolet explained.
Aurèle Nicolet premiered works by Ligeti, Takemitsu and Denisov, but as you've just heard, he was also at home in the Baroque. That was the Concerto in G major by Carl Philipp Emanuel (or C.P.E.) Bach.
In Berlin in 1960, Karajan had found ‘his’ flutist, and [Nicolet] was succeeded by Karlheinz Zöller, born in 1928. His was unusual case of a career in two parts. In 1968 in Buenos Aires, he was in a taxi accident. The driver died and [Zöller] had his lung pierced by a piece of metal. It was thought that he would never play again, but he underwent rehabilitation, and seven years later, in 1975, he returned. He regained his place as principal flutist with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, and the quality of his playing was special. He had a lot of air in his tone, which was unsettling for those sitting close to him. This gave him a very big and projected sound in the concert hall. Like Nicolet, he didn’t just stick to the classical repertoire; he liked to explore and even push back the possibilities and limits of the instrument, just as Olivier Messiaen did in Le Merle noir.
Recording 2: 8:06 to 14:01
Olivier Messiaen
Le Merle noir
Karlheinz Zöller (flute)
Aloys Kontarsky (piano)
Label: Pathé Marconi / Recorded 1991.
[That was] Le Merle noir by Olivier Messiaen, with Aloys Kontarsky on piano and Karlheinz Zöller on flute.
In the Berlin Philharmonic, there are two principals for each desk in the wind section, in other words, there are two principal flutes concurrently. In addition to Zöller, there was also one Fritz Daimler who left in 1969, the year in which a pupil of Karlheinz Zeller, Andreas Blau, was hired as his successor. [Blau] was 20 years old at the time and stayed in the position until 2015, a total of 46 years as principal flute.
He is the very serious bearded man you see on all the videos with Karajan. His father, Hans Blau, joined the Berlin Philharmonic as a violinist in 1948, just one year before Andreas was born. So the Berlin Philharmonic really was a family affair for him. He was also the son-in-law of Karajan’s principal trumpet, and later the father-in-law of the brilliant principal oboe Albrecht Mayer, who he played next to countless times. Andreas Blau is the epitome of the German orchestral flutist, impeccable and rigorous.
When Emmanuel Pahud joined him as another principal flute, it was really interesting to see the contrast between the freedom of one and the seriousness of the other. Blau was also a man of great open-mindedness; for example, he switched to the wooden flute late in life, whereas he had grown up, like everyone else, with the metal flute. Listen to him in Mozart, for example.
Recording 3: 15:32 to 20:04
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Quartet for flute and strings in D major K.285, 1st mvt, Allegro
Andreas Blau (flute)
Amadeus Quartet
Label: Deutsche Gramaphon / Recorded 1978.
[That was] Andreas Blau on flute with three of the members of the Amadeus Quartet in the first movement of Mozart's first quartet for flute and strings.
When I said that German flutists were first and foremost orchestral flutists, you mustn’t think that their horizons stopped at Brahms' symphonies and Wagner's operas. Long before the fashion for the Baroque, flutists across the Rhine showed a genuine interest in early repertoire and even in period instruments. Here I'm thinking of Gustav Scheck, Munich born and bred, who was principal flute at the Hamburg Opera, but who also founded an early music ensemble in the 1930s with the gamba player August Wenzinger. He was followed by [Kurt] Redel, who devoted a great deal of time and energy to Baroque music, as well as holding positions in orchestras.
Born in 1918, [Redel] was a professor at the Salzburg Mozarteum by the age of 20, where his pupils included Karlheinz Zöller, whom I mentioned earlier. Redel spent most of his orchestral career in Munich, as principal flutist of the Bavarian [State] Orchestra… and then at the Bavarian Radio [Symphony Orchestra], an orchestra founded just after the war by Eugen Jochum. [Redel] was principal flautist there from 1953 to 1974. If the name Redel sounds familiar, it may be because you have recordings of the Orchestre Pro Arte, a chamber orchestra he founded in Munich in 1952. Redel was also a conductor, but he never gave up on the flute. For example, in this Concerto in D minor by Telemann which he conducts, he's also the soloist.
Recording 4: 21:44 to 23:26
Georg Philippe Telemann
Concerto in D minor, Rondo
Orchestre Pro Arte of Munich
Kurt Redel (flute and conductor)
Label: Philips / [Recorded 1963]
I’ve mentioned Berlin, I’ve mentioned Munich, so I should say a word about the principal flute of the Staatskapelle Dresden, that great orchestra that Richard Wagner called the "enchanted harp”. Before the war and immediately after it was Fritz Rucker who was the principal flute of that orchestra. It is he, for example, who you hear in the gold standard recordings of Richard Strauss's symphonic poems by Rudolf Kempe.
Rucker taught in Dresden and trained those who came after him, such as Johannes Walter, who succeeded him in the 1960s. Then later, in the last thirty years of the 20th century, it was Eckart Haupt, born in 1945 in Saxony, who was the most important figure. At the time there was no widespread globalisation, so [the Staatskapelle] was not just a German orchestra: it was a Saxon orchestra. Eckart Haupt spent his entire career in Dresden. He was first engaged by Kurt Masur at the Dresden Philharmonic in 1970, then by Herbert Blomstedt at the Staatskapelle in 1981.
He was a very fine, cultured man who not only played the flute very well, but he was also a researcher who discovered previously unpublished scores by Quantz and Buffardin, who were the soloists at the Court of Dresden in the 18th century. [Rucker] even wrote a thesis on the introduction of the Boehm system at Dresden (the modern key system invented for the flute in the 19th century). And Eckart Haupt was also a painter whose work has been exhibited more than once. But it's as a flutist that I'm interested in him and it's as a flutist that we're going to hear him in Vivaldi.
Recording 5: 25:05 to 27:39
Antonio Vivaldi
Concerto RV104, 3rd mvt, Allegro
Eckart Haupt (flute)
Dresden Baroque Soloists
Conductor Peter Schreier
Label: Berlin Classics / [Recorded 1991]
[That was] the refined Eckart Haupt in Vivaldi's Concerto RV 104, with the Dresden [Baroque] Soloists, conducted by Peter Schreier… [Next week] we'll be travelling to the countries that are still missing from my panorama of orchestral flutists.
Broadcast October 4, 20231
Academic citation style: Radio France Musique, Oct 4, 2023, Grandes flûtes solos II—les Allemands (3/4), Christian Merlin; tr. and ed. Elisabeth Parry, 2024. Accessed [date]. <https://elisabethparry.substack.com/p/great-principal-flutes-the-germans-ep7>