An alternate musical history

“Personally,” says the classical flutist Gian-Luca Petrucci, “I felt the time was finally ripe for a reinterpretation of a certain 20th-­century musical era.”

Petrucci, a professor emeritus of flute at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory of Music in Rome, is referring to his recently released album The Other 20th Century: 1903-1986 (Brilliant Classics), a 54½-minute program that he recorded with the pianist Paola Pisa 15 years ago. As its title suggests, it’s intended as a kind of historical corrective.

And what, exactly, about our understanding of classical music in the 20th century needs correcting? “The achievements of avant-garde music based on the pursuit of new sounds, diverse instrumental uses, and constructions organized around rhythmic fragmentation or improvisation … failed to produce a stable structure,” Petrucci says. “The pursuit of ‘novelty’ essentially replaced the pursuit of writing.”

This kind of assessment has been stated by others. But seldom if ever have those doing the stating taken the time to argue for an alternate history while bringing the musical receipts as well. Organized more or less chronologically by the birth dates of the 12 composers whose works it contains, The Other 20th Century unfolds so delightfully that it’s easy to forget it’s expounding a thesis: (to quote Petrucci’s liner notes) that “critics, musicologists and instrumentalists have finally realized that, working alongside the New Music and the Avant-Garde, composers of great stature had upheld a tradition that was capable of being more than self-referential.”

Opening with Rhené Baton’s oneiric and elegantly lyrical 1924 “Passacaille” and following with Francis Poulenc’s pastoral “Mélodies pour Pipeau” (1934) (reworked from music that Poulenc composed for Jean Anouilh’s play La Reine Margot), the album sets off on a decidedly non-self-referential path and never looks back.

It sometimes glances sideways. But even the atonality that glints through Ernst Krenek’s “Suite für Flöte und Klavier” (1954) is counterbalanced by a succinct, neoclassical melodicism. And by the time the program begins its culmination with Giuseppe Mulè’s “Largo” (1903), you’ll be convinced not only that Petrucci’s “other 20th century” is no castle in Spain but a beautiful if overlooked musical edifice whose well-tended grounds are well worth exploring. “Ultimately,” says Petrucci, “no one should ever set aside anything without understanding, experimenting, and evaluating.”

And is there an “other 21st century” developing in the world of serious music? “Each era,” says Petrucci, “shapes its own physiognomy.”