I restarted the first piece on this album about 20 times because the sound of Ashley Solomon’s opening note, played on a grenadilla wooden flute modelled on an instrument from 1750, is just astonishing. It’s so warm, grainy, broad and breathy that it sounds more like a low recorder than a modern flute. Telemann’s Fantasias were meant for instruction as well as performance; they are a test and a bounty for flautists, a tangle of freewheeling challenges that can easily come a cropper in lesser hands. Solomon makes them dance and sing, he makes them spacious. The articulation is immaculate, the rhythms are buoyant and the recording quality, done in big church acoustics, is immediate and generous. Solomon doesn’t play the whole thing on grenadilla – we get flutes of porcelain and ivory, both instruments made in 1760 and full of charisma.
