On her break in the lounge at Peabody Institute, flutist Marina Piccinini can barely contain her excitement.
“This concert will be a celebration of flute, chamber music and friends,” she said.
Tonight and Tuesday night, faculty artist Piccinini will be joined by guest artists, Andreas Heafliger on piano and Yolanda Kondonassis at the harp. Additional Peabody faculty members will include Michael Kannen on violoncello and Violaine Melancon playing violin. The music they make together will honor standards from the flute repertoire.
Originally the concert was meant to be a recital, but Piccinini decided to go with chamber music in order to reunite with some friends through performance.
“One of the pieces we?ll be doing is the Mozart Quartet in D Major,” said Piccinini, an award-winning graduate of The Julliard School in New York. “Jennifer Stumm from the U.K. will be joining us on the viola, and the students are invited to rehearsals to see how we work.”
From his office in New York, Andreas Heafliger, Piccinini?s husband, speaks about the piece he and his wife will be performing, Pierre Boulez?s “Sonatine for Flute and Piano.”
“This is one of the hardest chamber music pieces ever written,” he said. “[Marina] and I learned it when we were 19, in our courting days at Julliard.”
While Heafliger said it was a tremendous amount of work learning the piece, they now play it almost by memory.
“Marina sort of snuck this engagement in on me,” said Heafliger, who?s currently touring with his own solo program. “But we do verywell together. We are two extremely different artists [and] an electric force on stage.”
The evening?s repertoire will also include “Assobio a Jato” (The Jet Whistle) by Heitor Villa Lobos, a piece first performed in 1950 in Rio de Janeiro, the hometown of Villa Lobos. In this work, Piccinini will be paired with Peabody?s Chamber Music Chair, cellist Michael Kannen, who said that “she has taken on an extraordinary program” and that it will be a “tour de force evening.”
“It?s a great time of excitement, making music with people you love,” Piccinini said.
IF YOU GO
Two nights of Flute Virtuosity, Peabody Chamber Orchestra
» Venue: Leith Symington Griswold Hall, Peabody Institute, 17 E. Mount Vernon Place, Baltimore
» Time: 8 p.m. today and Tuesday
» Tickets: $18 general admission, $10 seniors, $8 students
» More info: 410-659-8100 ext. 2
