Sunday 22 June 2025
Traditional Irish jig
This tune first appeared, without a title, in the large mid-19th-century music manuscript collection of County Cork cleric and uilleann piper James Goodman. As “The Humors of Glynn”, it was included in Francis O'Neill's Dance Music of Ireland (Chicago, 1907).
The tune was an especial favorite with the Scots national poet Robert Burns, who used it for his song “Their groves o' sweet myrtle let foreign lands reckon”.
There is a small village called Glynn in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. However, according to folklorist Peter Kennedy, the title of this jig is generally thought to refer to An Gleann (often called Glin or Glen), a village in County Limerick on the south shore of the river Shannon, almost opposite Knock.
Saturday 21 June 2025
from “20 Easy and Melodic Studies”
This easy common-time étude in D major is taken from the second book of Twenty Easy Melodic Progressive Studies by Italian composer Ernesto Köhler.
Friday 20 June 2025
from Mozart's “The Magic Flute”, arranged for two flutes
This aria is sung by Monostatos, Sarastro's moorish slave, in Act II of Mozart's famous opera Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute). Monostatos approaches Pamina while she is sleeping in the garden, and wishes that they could be together, but knows that he could never have her.
All feel the joy of love,
Bill and coo, flirt, snuggle, and kiss,
And I am supposed to avoid love,
Because I am ugly.
Have I, then, been given no heart?
I am also fond of girls,
Always to live without a woman
Would truly be the blaze of hell!
Thursday 19 June 2025
from Sonata in A minor by George Frideric Handel
The original sonatas for recorder of G.F. Handel belong to the standard repertoire for each flute player. The Recorder Sonata in A minor, Op. 1, No. 4, HWV 362, is one of the relatively few Opus 1 pieces that exist in just one version: many of the other sonatas are known under a number of different forms, which often causes great confusion.
About this sonata and its opening Larghetto, recorder player Pamela Thorby declared: “The A minor sonata is the most overtly dramatic of the six recorder sonatas. Imagine if you will the first movement as the tortured agonies of a would-be heroine as she laments upon the deceit of her lover. She weeps, the dotted bass line signifying the beat of a heavy and exhausted heart.” (Handel Recorder Sonatas on LINN Records, Pamela Thorby, recorder and Richard Egarr, harpsichord.)
Wednesday 18 June 2025
Traditional Irish jig
This jig appears to be unique to Chicago Police Captain Francis O'Neill's collection Dance Music of Ireland, published in 1907.
Tuesday 17 June 2025
from “Eighteen Exercises or Etudes for Flute”
This is the last étude from 18 exercices pour la flûte traversière by French Romantic composer Benoit Tranquille Berbiguier. The whole collection is now available for download!
Monday 16 June 2025
from “Sonates sans Basse à deux Flutes traverses”
Here is the fourth and last movement of Georg Philipp Telemann's first Sonata without Bass for Two Transverse Flutes, or Two Violins, or Two Recorders. This piece is a 12/8-time binary-form Allegro in G major, featuring some wide interval leaps.
