Flute Concerto in A Minor

France did not participate fully in the formation of the concerto genre at the end of the seventeenth century, as the country had been hampered by the restrictive artistic policies of Louis XIV. However, the concerto found a public venue in Paris with the establishment in 1725 of the Concert Spirituel, whose performances took place at the Tuileries Palace through September 1789. This location may be why nearly everything from the archives of the concert series that had not been previously published is irretrievably lost. In October 1789, Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and the dauphin were taken prisoner at Tuileries, and the castle had to be cleared in a hurry; the loss of the sheet music collection came at the latest on 10 August 1792, when revolutionaries forced their way into the palace and massacred seven hundred people.

Even though the flutist Michel Blavet performed about a hundred times at the Concert Spirituel between 1726 and 1749, only a single flute concerto by him has survived. This unconditionally virtuosic piece demonstrates the “French” quality of clarity in spite of the omnipresence of dazzling chains of sixteenth notes—as well as a charming pair of gavottes in the middle.