I began listening to these two collections by comparing the works that are common to both of them, and at that point I thought I would end up by marginally preferring Jonathan Snowden's recital to Michael Cox's: Snowden sounds more of a soloist, somehow, with a more forceful tone (though no lack of quietness), bigger gestures and a rather more varied palette. His reading of the Honegger has a bit more character than Cox's, and he projects the Poulenc with more elan. But then I tumed to Cox's account of Martinu's fine sonata, and I couldn't hear anything that his elegantly clean line and coolly brizht tone failed to search out in it. In the Copland, too, one of the composer's most quintessentially American works but with a deep vein of reserved emotion in its elegiac slow movement, Cox's purity of sound seems ideally suited to the music, and he sustains the lyricism of that central movement most beautifully.
Snowden's biggest piece, to be set in the balance against Cox's Martinu and Copland, is the Widor Suite. At 18 minutes it is slightly more protracted than its material can justify but it redeems itself by the charming sentimentality of its slow movement (and by the fact that Widor breaks off from his lyrical self-indulgence, blushes and clears his throat, and then pretends that the music is after all a grande piece de concours by launching into a very showy cadenza) and the quirkily attractive second theme of its finale. Snowden is fully equal to its very comprehensive demands, warms his tone agreeably for the two pieces Faure pieces, finds both grace and colour in the Roussel and both brilliance and mystery in the Messiaen. Does that seem to put him in the lead? Can Cox redress matters with his dapper account of Vaughan Williams's suite of neo-baroque miniatures (jig, gavotte and hornpipe, plus The Blackbird Ascending in the first movement)?
Missing the point, I think: we have here two different styles of flute playing, with programmes shrewdly chosen to suit them. Cox is more reticent, his sound more 'straight', Snowden warmer and more colourful. In fact I now (marginally) prefer Cox, largely on the strength of his Martinu and Copland (I doubt whether I should play Snowden's Widor as often as either). Both have excellent pianists, although neither recording solves the flute/piano balance problem ideally, Kingdom is (again marginally) the more successful.'