Concertino for flute

Some strange legends about the Concertino in D major have circulated in English musical texts, including one claiming that Cécile Chaminade wrote it just after seeing her lover, an eminent flautist with whom she had been carrying on an ill-concealed love affair, become engaged to someone else. Perhaps it was necessary to create a climate of passion around this work in order to explain its extraordinary success. Be that as it may, its genesis is in fact quite different, and it has nothing to do with a passionate love affair! The Concertino was commissioned in 1902 by the director of the Paris Conservatoire, Théodore Dubois, who asked Chaminade to provide a technically difficult piece to be used for the flute students taking part in the annual awards competition; at the same time, he also asked her to compose a piece for the sight-reading test. The score of the Concertino is dedicated to Paul Taffanel, professor of flute at the Conservatoire. In an interview in 1934 Cécile Chaminade admitted that she had “set about the work with rather bad grace”: she would have preferred to compose for the violin or the piano. “It seems to me rather melancholic,” she said, “that I entered the Conservatoire repertoire with a composition for the flute.” But in providing the instrument with such a superb piece, combining lyricism and virtuosity, she nevertheless ensured that it would be very widely performed. Published in 1902, the Concertino soon left the academic context to meet with great success in the concert hall. In 1906, at a gala evening held at the Trocadéro in Paris, it was performed by Adolphe Hennebains, supported by a 150-strong orchestra! That version, orchestrated by Chaminade herself, was published by Enoch in 1908, thus becoming the composer’s last symphonic work.