Ballade for Flute & Orchestra, op. 288

Reinecke wrote the Ballade for flute and orchestra in 1910, the last year of his life, when he was eighty-six; it was published after his death. It is a single movement in D major, and it forms a pair with the flute concerto of two years earlier — both written for an instrument he understood unusually well, as the composer of the sonata Undine of 1882. Reinecke had run the Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts for thirty-five years and taught Grieg, Janáček, Bruch and Albéniz; his own music stayed within the harmonic language of his youth.