When Carol Wincenc first encountered Danish composer Carl Nielsen's Concerto for Flute and Orchestra as a young conservatory student, she was completely captivated.
"When I first learned it in my early 20s — it was not a popular concerto to study — there were other concertos more popular to perform," said Wincenc. "When I came upon this one because it was requested of me, I had a love affair with the piece. I remember I was learning and memorizing it, staying at my parents' home outside Buffalo, New York, and my mother would say, 'Don't you want to come up for a meal?' I had such a powerful bonding experience with the music, I didn't want any distractions."
Wincenc will perform the concerto — which made its premiere in Paris in 1926 and a few months later, with a rewritten ending, in Copenhagen — in the first of three Saturday Symphony concerts as part of the 2015 Sarasota Music Festival.
Sarasota Music Festival schedule
Flutist Carol Wincenc / COURTESY PHOTO
The three-week festival gets underway Monday at Holley Hall, with 62 music students from the top conservatories and music programs in the United States and around the world gathering for master classes, open rehearsals, student recitals, and concerts. Wincenc is among the many faculty artists who teach students during the day and perform in Artist Showcases, Festival Concerts and Saturday Symphonies in the evening.
The festival is in its 51st year, the ninth under the artistic direction of Robert Levin, who announced earlier this year that the 2016 festival would be his final year as director, although he plans to continue as a faculty artist.
Levin, a Mozart scholar who recently retired from Harvard, said he expects this year's festival will be "particularly intense for me. I think I'm going to be playing more pieces than ever. Three pieces in the third week, one in the second week, one in the first week." He'll be at the keyboard for Brahms' Piano Trio No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 101, on June 5; Copland's Sextet on June 12; Franck's Violin Sonata on June 18; Dvorak's Piano Quartet No. 2 on June 19, and Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2 on June 20.
But, he added, "I don't try to get excessive exposure as a performer. I feel my main task is to give that exposure to my colleagues and to give the community and the student participants as varied and as stimulating a bunch of repertoire as I can."
Sarasota Music Festival orchestra under the baton of Larry Rachleff. / COURTESY PHOTO
This year's festival will include newcomers to the faculty and to the repertoire, and in the second week will showcase alumnus Frank Huang, recently appointed as concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, in a performance of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E Minor.
"That carries forward a policy in recent years of having distinguished alumni join us," said Levin. "Not only are we delighted to welcome Frank, we welcome him in the immediate aftermath of having been named concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic. These are the kinds of events that make clear to everybody in the community what this festival really means in terms of what our distinguished alumni can do. We're very proud of these people. So it's with particular pleasure that we showcase these artists that have come so far so fast."
Violinist Frank Huang / COURTESY PHOTO
In addition to new teaching faculty — Ralph Kirshbaum, cello; Jeffrey Kahan, piano; William VerMeulen, horn; and Hugh Wolff, conductor — the festival has 20 works programmed that have not been performed at past festivals, starting on Thursday when the faculty's first Artist Showcase concert is entirely made up of premieres of works by Bach, Kogan, Mozart, Chopin, Scriabin and Debussy. Later concerts include festival premieres of Mendelssohn's Piano Quartet No. 3. Schubert's Overture to "Die Verschworene," Sibelius' "The Swan of Tuenela," Schumann's Symphony No. 3, Paganini's Caprices No. 9 and 17, Copland's Sextet, Bruch's String Octet in B-flat Major, Varese's "Octandre," Beethoven's Symphony No. 8; Mozart's Duo No. 1 in G Major, Franck's Violin Sonata in A Major, Wiesenberg's "An Octet Movement" (Homage to Mendelssohn), Ligeti's "Concert Romanesc," and Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2.
"I'm always trying to slant the repertoire in the direction of pieces that are brand new," said Levin. "To be able to be giving first performances to these pieces is an achievement. We play some of the 'same old stuff' that the audience really wants to hear, but no, we don't do the 'same old stuff.' Twenty works that have never been done in the history of the festival, that shows a commitment to variety and casting a wider net."
Although Wincenc's performance of the Nielsen flute concerto is not a festival premiere, it's "a very, very attractive piece" said Levin. "It'll be nice to have her once again playing the concerto, and collaborate with (conductor) Nicholas McGegan, which should generate a good deal of energy and pizzazz."
Nielsen, said Levin, is "a composer of breathless expressive range, of music which sparkles and has humor but can be absolutely searing in its fervor."
The piece speaks of Scandinavia and its seasons in a deeply emotional way, said Wincenc.
"Those influences of nature to me are what carve out a lot of what's going on in this piece," she said. "It just has the most great range of emotional display, bittersweet melancholy, and then these ridiculous outbursts of emotional chaos."
The concerto was written as part of a project by Nielsen to write concertos for each members of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet; he started with the flute concerto but completed only it and a clarinet concerto.
The work includes a great deal of back-and-forth between the flute and the bass trombone.
"The bass trombonist was razzing the flutist all the time," said Wincenc. "He's constantly chiding and ridiculing and poking fun, and the flutist is trying to get back with bickering and complaining. It's not particularly beautiful flute writing. It's very athletic and jagged."
