String Quartet welcomes home flutist
The Spokane String Quartet keeps up an annual tradition of bringing back musicians who began their careers in Spokane and who have expanded those careers nationally and internationally.
Sunday’s season finale features Spokane-born flutist Anna Povich de Mayor. The program includes works by South American composers both well-known (Astor Piazzolla, Heitor Villa Lobos) and not so well-known (Walter Burle Marx), along with works arranged for flute and string quartet from the popular Brazilian tradition.
Povich de Mayor grew up in Spokane and studied flute with Spokane Symphony flutist Gale Coffee. The Shadle Park High School graduate was a Young Artist winner at the Greater Spokane Music and Allied Arts Festival (now Musicfest Northwest) in 1997.
She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of North Texas, where she studied with Mary Karen Clardy, and a doctorate from the State University of New York’s Stony Brook campus, where she studied with Carol Wincenc.
She lives in New York with her husband, Pablo, a Colombian pianist, composer and arranger who has an 11-piece jazz band.
“My fascination with Latin music started when I was studying back in Texas,” Povich de Mayor says. “But since marrying Pablo in 1999, I have gotten more closely acquainted not only with Colombian music, since that’s where he’s from, but all types of Latin music.”
Povich de Mayor is the flutist in the New York Harp Trio – not three harps, but a flute, viola and harp ensemble.
“All three of us are busy with our own separate careers, but we have long-term plans to make the trio a substantial part of those careers,” she says. “And I have also become a steady member of Pablo’s band, and I have students at a music school in Manhattan and am involved in an in-school private lesson teaching program down on the Lower East Side.”
Sunday’s program includes two movements from Ginastera’s Second String Quartet, Villa Lobos’ “Jet Whistle” for flute and cello, and some pieces by the famed Argentinian tango composer Piazzolla in arrangements by Povich de Mayor, her husband, and by tango violinist Sergio Reyes.
“I was also able to track down a really fantastic but unpublished piece by the classical Brazilian composer Burle Marx,” Povich de Mayor says.
“Burle Marx is of German descent and eventually came to Philadelphia from Brazil,” she says. “The woman who sent me this music had premiered it 10 years ago with members of the Philadelphia Orchestra.”
The concert also will include some choros – Brazilian popular dances – introduced to Povich de Mayor by Brazilian traditional-jazz musicians who were working with he husband in New York.
“And I am including an original composition of my husband’s based on Colombian rhythms,” she says.