Jean-Pierre Louis Rampal (7 January 1922 – 20 May 2000) was a French flautist and conductor. Rampal popularised the flute in the post–World War II years, recovering flute compositions from the Baroque era, and spurring contemporary composers, such as Francis Poulenc, to create new works that have become modern standards in the flautist's repertoire.
Born in Marseille, the only child of Andrée (née Roggero) and flautist Joseph Rampal. His father Joseph was taught by Hennebains, who also taught Rene le Roy and Marcel Moyse.
Under the tutelage of his father, Rampal began playing the flute at the age of 12. He studied the Altès method at the Conservatoire, where he won first prize in the school's annual flute competition in 1937 at age 16. This was also the year of his first public recital at the Salle Mazenod in Marseille. By then, Rampal was playing second flute alongside his father in the Orchestre des Concerts Classiques de Marseille.
His career in music began without the full encouragement of his parents. Rampal's mother and father encouraged him to become a doctor or surgeon as they felt those professions were more reliable than becoming a professional musician. At the beginning of the Second World War, Rampal duly entered medical school in Marseille, studying there for three years. In 1943, authorities of the Nazi Occupation of France drafted him for forced labour in Germany. To avoid this, he fled to Paris, where it was easier to avoid detection, by frequently changing his lodgings.
While in Paris, Rampal auditioned to study flute at the Paris Conservatoire, where he was taught by Gaston Crunelle from January 1944. Years later, he succeeded Crunelle as flute professor at the Conservatoire. After four months, Rampal's performance of Jolivet's Le chant de Linos won him the coveted first prize in the conservatory's annual flute competition.
In 1945, following the liberation of Paris, Rampal was invited by the composer Henri Tomasi—then conductor of the Orchestre National de France—to perform the Flute Concerto by Jacques Ibert, written for Marcel Moyse in 1934, live on French National Radio. It launched his concert career and was the first of many such broadcasts.
With the war over, Rampal embarked on a series of performances: at first, within France; and then, in 1947, in Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. Almost from the beginning, he was accompanied by pianist and harpsichordist Robert Veyron-Lacroix, whom he had met at the Paris Conservatoire in 1946. Rampal viewed himself as having a somewhat emotional Provençal temperament, while Veyron-Lacroix was a more refined character (a "true upper class Parisian"). The appearance of this duo after the war has been described as a "complete novelty", allowing them to make a rapid impact on the music-going public in France and elsewhere. In March 1949, in the face of some scepticism, they hired the Salle Gaveau in Paris to perform a recital programme made up solely of chamber music for flute, which then seemed radical. It was one of the first flute/piano recitals the city had seen, and caused a "sensation". The success encouraged Rampal to continue, repeating the recital the following year in Paris. Throughout the early 1950s, the duo made regular radio broadcasts and gave concerts across Europe. Their first international tour in 1953 spanned Indonesia. From 1954 onward, he held his first concerts in eastern Europe—most significantly in Prague, where he premiered Jindrich Feld's Flute Concerto in 1956. In the same year, he appeared in Canada at the Menton festival, where he played for the first time in concert with violinist Isaac Stern, who became a lifelong friend and a considerable influence on Rampal's own approach.
On 14 February 1958, Rampal and Veyron-Lacroix made their US debut with a recital of Poulenc, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Prokofiev in Washington, D.C. at the Library of Congress. In 1959, Rampal gave his first concert in New York City, at the Town Hall. Rampal's successful partnership with Veyron-Lacroix produced their 1962 double LP of the complete Bach flute sonatas. They performed and toured together for about 35 years, until the early 1980s, when Veyron-Lacroix was forced to retire due to ill health. Rampal then formed a new, 20-year long musical partnership with American pianist John Steele Ritter.
While he pursued his career as a soloist, Rampal remained an ensemble player throughout his life. In 1946, he and oboist Pierre Pierlot founded the Quintette a Vent Francais (French Wind Quintet), formed of a group of musical friends who had made their way through the war: Rampal, Pierlot, clarinetist Jacques Lancelot, bassoonist Paul Hongne, and horn-player Gilbert Coursier. Early in 1944, they had played together, broadcasting at night from a secret "cave" radio station at the Club d’essai in rue de Bec, Paris—a programme of music outlawed by the Nazis, including works with Jewish links by composers such as Hindemith, Schoenberg and Milhaud. The Quintet remained active until the 1960s.
Between 1955 and 1962, Rampal took up the post of Principal Flute at the Paris Opera, traditionally the most prestigious orchestral position open to a French flautist. Having been married in 1947 and now a father of two, the post offered him a regular income.
Rampal's first commercial recording, made in 1946 for the Boite a Musique label in Montparnasse, Paris, was of Mozart's Flute Quartet in D, with the Trio Pasquier. A key element in Rampal's success in the years immediately after World War II was his passion for the music of the Baroque era. Aside from a few works by Bach and Vivaldi, Baroque music was still largely unrecognised when Rampal started out. He desired to promote the flute as a prominent solo instrument, which required a wide and flexible repertoire. From the start, he was aware of the "Golden Age of the Flute", as the Baroque era had become known. Hundreds of concertos and chamber works written for the flute in the 18th century had fallen into obscurity, and he felt that the sheer abundance of this early material might offer long-term possibilities for an aspiring soloist.
Even before World War II, he had begun collecting obscure sheet music from the Baroque, making himself familiar with original publishers and catalogues despite very few published editions being available. He went on to research in libraries and archives in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Turin, and every other major city he performed in, and corresponded with others across the musical world. He studied Quantz and his treatise On Playing The Flute (1752), and later acquired an original copy of it. For Rampal, the Baroque legacy could spark a renewed interest in the flute. Whereas Le Roy, Laurent and Barrère had all recorded two or three of Bach's flute sonatas between 1929 and 1939, between 1947 and 1950 Rampal recorded all of them for Boîte à Musique. He was also beginning to regularly perform the complete Bach sonatas in recital, organising them across two evenings. As early as 1950–51, he became the first to record all six of Vivaldi's Op.10 concertos.
In an interview with The New York Times, he offered an explanation for the appeal of Baroque music after the war: "With all this bad mess we had in Europe during the war, people were looking for something quieter, more structured, more well balanced than Romantic music." He applied his own style to the original texts, developing an individual approach to interpretation and, after the Baroque style, to improvised ornamentation. Throughout, Rampal was never tempted to perform on a period instrument; the movement that championed "authentic" instruments for "true" performance of Baroque music had not yet emerged. Instead, he drew on the full range of effects offered by the modern flute to play the Baroque compositions. "Enchantment is the best possible word to describe this concert", said one Canadian reviewer for Le Devoir in 1956; "Rampal's playing struck me through its variety, its flexibility, its colour and above all its liveliness." His earliest recordings were 1946 and 1950, and Rampal benefited from the birth of the long-playing gramophone record. Before 1950, all of his recordings were on 78 rpm discs. After 1950, the 33⅓ rpm long-playing era allowed much greater freedom to accommodate the rate at which he was recording performances. At the same time, the birth of the television age ensured Rampal a wider prominence in France than any previous flute-player, through his many concert and recital appearances in the late 1950s and beyond.