April 1969 for Chicago classical music station WEFM – contained on CD 16 of JP Rampal: The Complete HMV Recordings: "A Conversation with Jean-Pierre Rampal"</ref> the piece has since become established as a flute favourite. Over his career, he performed all of the flute masterpieces that were composed in the first half of the 20th century, including works by Debussy, Ravel, Roussel, Ibert, Milhaud, Martinů, Hindemith, Honegger, Dukas, Françaix, Damase, and Feld. By the early 1960s, Rampal was established as the first truly international modern flute virtuoso, and was performing with many of the world's leading orchestras. As a chamber musician, he continued to collaborate with numerous other soloists, forming particularly close and long-lasting collaborations with violinist Isaac Stern and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. A number of composers wrote especially for Rampal, including Henri Tomasi (Sonatine pour flûte seule, 1949), Jean Françaix (Divertimento, 1953), André Jolivet (Concerto, 1949), Jindřich Feld (Sonata, 1957), and Jean Martinon (Sonatine). Others included Jean Rivier, Antoine Tisné, Serge Nigg, Charles Chaynes, and Maurice Ohana. In addition, he premiered a large number of works by contemporary composers such as Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Ezra Laderman, David Diamond, and Krzysztof Penderecki. His transcribing in 1968, at the composer's own suggestion, of Aram Khatchaturian's Violin Concerto (recorded 1970) showed Rampal's willingness to broaden the flute repertoire further by borrowing from other instruments. In 1978, the Armenian-American composer Alan Hovhaness wrote his Symphony No. 36, which contained a melodic flute part tailored especially for Rampal, who gave the premiere performance of the work in concert with the National Symphony Orchestra. The only piece dedicated to Rampal that he never publicly performed was the Sonatine (1946) by Pierre Boulez, which—with its spiky, explosive figures and extravagant use of flutter-tonguing—he found too abstract for his taste. Elsewhere, when sometimes criticised for not playing enough contemporary avant-garde work—"Avant garde of what?" he would ask—Rampal confirmed his aversion to music that looked "like the blueprints for a plumber... pieces that go tweak, twonk, thump, snort—this doesn't inspire me." One piece in particular, written with Rampal in mind, has since become a modern standard in the essential flute repertoire. Rampal's compatriot Francis Poulenc was commissioned by the Coolidge Foundation of America in 1957 to write a new flute piece. The composer consulted with Rampal regularly on shaping the flute part, and the result, in Rampal's own words, is "a pearl of the flute literature". The