Emmanuel Pahud

Last night Michael and I watched Lumière, Le Cinéma!, a 2024 film that stitches together several dozen fifty-second-long Lumière Brothers films from the late nineteenth century, covers the product with informative narration, and underscores it with music by Gabriel Fauré. Included in the underscore was the first part of the Fantasie for Flute and Piano. The performance was so beautiful, so deeply original, and so perfectly of the period (late nineteenth-century France), that I couldn't imagine it would have been anyone other than Emmanuel Pahud playing. I was correct. It was his recording with Eric Le Sage.

I first heard Emmanuel Pahud in 1995 when I was working as a CD reviewer for the American Record Guide. The recording was of sonatas by Carl Maria von Weber. The review was never published. Perhaps the recording label (Valois) was too small, or the editor didn't think it was important enough music to include in the magazine. In those pre-email days we used to send three-inch discs with reviews typed in Word Perfect in the mail to the magazine, and that was that. I did not keep a copy of my review.

The flute playing on the Weber recording was remarkable. Pahud had, even at the beginning of his career, found a path towards musical infinity with the flute. Though I aspired at one point to make my way in music through the flute, I knew that the flute wasn't the instrument that could take me where I wanted to go.

But what a joy it is to listen to Emmanuel Pahud play the flute.

Here's the Fauré: