Flutist Adds Flair To Zephyr Show
The flute looks shiny and simple. “But this instrument can do a lot of things,” says Kendall Feeney. “It can imitate the songs of birds and it can bring you to the doorstep of the avant-garde. On this concert, it will do both.”
Feeney is pianist and director of Zephyr, Spokane’s 20th-century chamber music series. She will be joined Sunday afternoon at The Met by flutist Michael Faust for a recital of flute and piano music by Olivier Messiaen, Steve Reich, Edgard Varese and Sergei Prokofiev.
Spokane audiences know Faust, now the solo flutist of the Cologne Radio Orchestra in Germany, from his performances at the Northwest Bach Festival. He first performed at the annual Bach Festival in 1991 and has returned each year since.
“Two years ago when Michael was here for a Bach concert he came to one of the Zephyr programs,” Feeney says. “He was really interested in what we were doing and we discussed possibilities of his coming back to do a concert of 20th-century music.
“He has tons of energy and ideas. His playing and his involvement with the music he plays makes him any concert organizer’s delight to bring.”
Arranging a performance with Faust was not so easy. The Cologne Radio Orchestra is a very busy band. Besides his job as solo flute in Cologne, Faust also plays solo engagements elsewhere in Europe and in Asia, and he has a substantial recording career as well. Recently he has recorded an album of contemporary flute music with Leonard Hokanson for the GM label.
Feeney and Faust will open Sunday’s recital with Messiaen’s “Le merle noir” (“The Blackbird”). Messiaen, a French composer who died at 84 in 1992, was important for his highly mystical church music and as someone who absorbed practically all the significant 20th-century musical techniques. But he was also fascinated by the natural world, spending hours listening to the singing of birds and painstakingly notating their songs.
One of the classics of the early avant-garde, Varese’s “Density 21.5” also will be heard on Sunday’s program. Written in 1935 for unaccompanied flute, the work’s title comes from the specific gravity of platinum, the metal out of which many modern flutes are made.
“Varese was later going to become an important pioneer in electronic music,” Feeney says. “Even in his earlier works, Varese used sounds that leaned in the direction of non-acoustic music, with things like key-clicks and flutter tonguing and other non-traditional sounds.”
American modernism is represented by Steve Reich’s “Vermont Counterpoint,” a work for a live flutist performing with 10 other flutists on pre-recorded tape. “Reich is one of the composers who, like Philip Glass, is associated with minimalism,” Feeney says. “By overlapping the recorded sounds and the live flute, Reich creates a multi-layered sound that immerses listeners in a really vibrant texture.”
Sunday’s concert will end with the most frequently performed of all works for flute and piano, Prokofiev’s Sonata in D major. “It’s hard to imagine that this lovely, lyrical sonata was written in the darkest days of World War II,” Feeney says. “It has some sensuous melodies and some moments that suggest the lumbering movement of a bear in a Russian circus.
“I’ve played this sonata many times over the years, at least 20 years, with both flutists and violinists,” Feeney says. “Getting together with Michael to rehearse it, it became a new piece for me. He demands so much and he gives so much to this music, it becomes brand new.”
, DataTimes MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: ZEPHYR Zephyr, with flutist Michael Faust and pianist Kendall Feeney, will perform Sunday at 3 p.m. at The Met. Tickets are $12 and $14 ($8 for students) at The Met, Street Music and G&B Select-a-Seat outlets, or by calling 325-SEAT.