Various composers: Silver Bow, Katherine Bryan, flute

Silver Bow is flautist Katherine Bryan’s transcription project: nine well-loved showpieces written originally for violin, adapted by Bryan herself for flute and recorded with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under Jac van Steen. The album opens with Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, a piece already strongly associated with birdsong, and one that transfers to a wind instrument more naturally than most violin repertoire attempts to.

The rest of the programme leans on genuine violin virtuoso showpieces: Saint-Saëns’s Introduction et rondo capriccioso and Romance, Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen, and Paganini’s 24th Caprice, whose famous variations Bryan renders with flute-specific techniques including flutter-tonguing and pop-tonguing in place of the original’s string pyrotechnics. Kreisler’s Liebesleid and Massenet’s Méditation from Thaïs give the disc its more reflective moments, alongside Drdla’s Serenade No. 1 (“Kubelik-Serenade”).

Bryan has built her career largely inside the RSNO, where she has held the Principal Flute chair since the age of 21, alongside a solo career that has taken her to concerto engagements with leading orchestras and broadcasts on Classic FM and BBC Radio 3. She was a prize-winner at the Royal Overseas League Music Competition in London and the Young Concert Artists Competition in New York, and reached the final of BBC Young Musician of the Year on three separate occasions.

A note on this page

No independent critic review of this recording survived in the archive we could recover, only the label’s own recording summary and artist biography, which this page draws on for its verifiable facts (the real programme, real biographical details about Katherine Bryan). No critical opinion has been invented or attributed to anyone; where the original page offered only promotional description rather than independent assessment, that’s reflected honestly here.