Silvius Leopold Weiss: Flute reconstruction by Michel Cardin and Eileen Hadidian, Guitar arrangement by Michel Cardin
Doberman – Yppan: score and separate parts (72, 36 and 48 pages respectively)
This final volume in the five volume series devoted to Silvius Leopold Weiss’s collection named The London Manuscript, has what amounts to the duet pieces for flute and guitar in them.
The added difficulty with this final volume is that the original 317 page volume that is in The British Library, and called The London Manuscript doesn’t actually have any flute parts, but is completely missing them, and so the flute notation for these five final pieces have been reconstructed by Michel Cardin, aided by Eileen Hadidian, and very good they are, but obviously they cannot be considered what Weiss originally wrote, and potential purchasers should consider this.
Having said that, just as pieces, very much in the Baroque style, they are wonderfully done, and amount to three concertos for lute and transverse flute (now guitar and flute), and finally 2 mystery sonatas without any soprano voice and strangely, no title either. The three concertos are each in four movements and the music is substantial and definitely not for the faint – hearted, for either instrument, but they are great sounding pieces regardless of all my comments earlier.
Therefore to summarise, what you have here is 100% Weiss in the guitar part, but with a flute part completely re – imagined by our two arrangers, and the end result is very cleverly sounding Pseudo Baroque, and until, perhaps by some miracle, the original flute parts one day re-emerge, hidden for 300 years in some library, or museum or house, which, let’s face it, is not liable to actually ever happen, this volume is the best that you are going to get. It is however a really great piece of work, and so you are not liable to ever be able to improve on what you find here.
Chris Dumigan
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