You have had a distinguished career and you have featured as soloist during recitals and concerts across Europe, Asia and the USA. You have come to Malta from New York to perform with the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra on 11th December. You are known to be an ardent advocate and passionate performer of contemporary music. What will you be playing the Manoel Theatre next Friday?
Though as you rightly pointed out I perform a lot of contemporary music and work with many composers on new works for flute, on Friday I will be playing Carl Nielsen's Flute Concerto with the MPO. This concerto was written in 1926 so it is not that new. It is however a significant work in the flute repertoire, one that is popular amongst flutist and as a result gets played quite a bit.
Can you tell us something about this composer and this particular composition please?
Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) is revered as the greatest Danish composer of all time though his international standing as a composer gained momentum in the 60's after Leonard Bernstein, then Musical conductor of the New York Philharmonic, championed his music and recorded several of his and Sibelius's symphonies making the two composers known to US audiences.
Daniel Grimley in his book Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism (Boydell Press, 2011) describes Nielsen as "one of the most playful, life-affirming and awkward voices in twentieth-century music." As Grimley states, Nielsen's"melodic richness and harmonic vitality are immediately appealing and engaging."
The flute concerto came about after the premiere of his Woodwind Quintet in 1922 following which he decided to set about writing a concerto for each of the five woodwind players who performed his quintet. Of these he completed only 2, one for Flute (1926) written for flutist Holger Gilbert-Jespersen, and another for clarinet (1928). Nielsen worked on the flute concerto over the course of the summer of 1926 as he travelled down to Southern Europe. Premiered in Paris in October it was later revised with Nielsen writing a new ending for the piece.
One striking thing about the concerto is the fact that each of the two movements keep shifting between different moods from aggressive/ dramatic short passages to pastoral and lyrical ones so often that it could be seen as somewhat schizophrenic. Another interesting feature is the fact that the flute engages in dialogues with individual instruments, including with the clarinet, the bass trombone, and the timpani. Perhaps the extensive use of the trombone has something to do with the fact that Nielsen himself played trombone in military band.
I know that you had played with the then Manoel Theatre Orchestra when you were merely 16- years-old and you consider the orchestra to be your 'musical home'. How do you feel about performing after some twenty years, with what is now a Philharmonic Orchestra and a much bigger and more accomplished orchestra?
I kept in touch with many colleagues and I also got to know new colleagues in the Philharmonic Orchestra. I tend to follow what is going on in Malta and I am pleased that the national orchestra has evolved. Needless to say I am still very nostalgic about my old orchestra, the Manoel Theatre Orchestra, as apart from growing up there as a musician, I was very much involved in my days in the Manoel Theatre Orchestra in it's process of change. I chaired the Union orchestra committee, which reached some very important collective agreements in those days including a major shift in status and salaries for the orchestra players who then were put on a professional scale at par with similar ranks in the Civil Service. So I feel very good about the fact that I was involved in taking the orchestra into a stage that then made it ripe for a further evolution to what it is now. When the current Philharmonic Orchestra was founded I was already abroad so I was not part of that.
You have had music composed expressly for you. The late Charles Camilleri composed many new flute works for you. But he wasn't the only one. In fact composers from all over the world composed, some, among the very distinguished. You have also commissioned works for the flute yourself. What is it about contemporary music that you find so enchanting?
I do not see a huge gulf between what is often referred to as standard repertoire and contemporary music. I work across various genres and I have grown to appreciate all aspects of music precisely because of the taxing nature of contemporary music which puts the onus of interpretation on the performer, perhaps in an even more pronounced way than standard repertoire, though let's not forget that standard repertoire has its own traditions of interpretation.
When Charles Camilleri initially introduced me to his music and to the wider world of contemporary music, I felt that I was extending my music-making into a much wider world, but I also felt that this was enhancing my own engagement with music as a whole. This helped me understand not only the importance of musicianship as a performative narrative, but also a wider range of new skills were opened to me - which prompted me to study abroad with performers like Sebastian Bell, Julius Baker, as well as research and collaborate with Robert Dick, Patricia Spencer and others who, like me, move from one end of the spectrum to the other.
This also helped me engage with music as a living organism that is not simply limited to technique or interpretation, but also to languages that bring forth the human nature of music, as a language of diverse languages, and as a community of practice that gave me what it takes to not only play music but also to partake of the making of music through collaboration with composers, through teaching, and through the exploration of entirely new music pedagogies that one adopts when confronted with new and not so new musical genres. More so I found myself working and preforming in conferences and symposia where I did not only perform but also presented papers on this matter. This gave me the opportunity to work with musicologists as well as composers, with theorists as well as performers. It is a world that opens up and where I found myself not only playing the whole range of flutes, but also working with brilliant performers of instruments like the Sitar, the Ku-Cheng, the Kayagum, the Tabla, the Derabukka, the African drums ... and many other instruments.
More than just new music, this also introduced me to a world that combines various music traditions, while at the same time enhancing the music arts repertoire with possibilities that are infinite in their possibilities.
Composers who I have worked with have been many but in the last few months I have worked with and premiered many pieces including works written for me by the Grammy award winning composer Carlos Castro who wrote a flute solo and a flute and string quartet piece for me, a flute and piano work whose NY premiere I performed by British composer Bushra El Turk, and works by American composers Pamela Sklar, Rain Worthington, Jan Gilbert, and Marylnn Bliss amongst others.
You have been studying and practicing for a very long time. You are a successful academic as well as performer. Did you have to make any sacrifices to achieve all this?
I feel lucky that as a family we are always there to help each other and we continue to do this as our daughter now finishes her first degree. Both my husband and I are first generation graduates and we were born from working class families - of which we are both very proud. We have sacrificed a lot to get where we are and we owe this to the dedication by which our parents gave us all their support in whichever way they could.
As to sacrifice and hard work, one could easily cite high cost of living, high expenses in sustaining one's profession, and the high investment that education involves-especially in countries where education has become astronomically costly. However the biggest sacrifice that we probably incurred has to do with living a long distance away from our families.Unfortunately we both have lost a parent while living abroad, and so we often feel that a lot of the time we could have spent near them is now gone for ever. Yet we also know that our parents have always supported us morally and in all ways possible and we cherish our parents, both those who are still with us and those who have left us. Also being a small family, we often feel that this is hard also for our daughter whose cousins and wider family is always somewhere else. Then again, this makes us appreciate more our wider family and we count that as a blessing.
You consider yourself a citizen of the world and for the last 10 years you have lived in the multi-cultural milieu of New York. Is there anything you miss in Malta, apart from members of your family, when you are there?
I miss a sense of belonging, which always remains special when it comes to Malta. We have moved several countries and often we feel torn between places where we lived. One good example is how we keep sharing our affinity with Scotland and New York, both of which we regard as home. Yet we also miss Europe and especially the Mediterranean, which we consider as a wider home as it gets closer to Malta. Malta remains the centre of this wider world for us, but on the other hand we have come to enjoy and appreciate Malta precisely because we appreciate this wider context that gives Malta its unique characteristics. I also happen to believe that being Maltese also gives me the opportunity to engage with the world in its diversity. After all, as I often explain to friends, our language expresses the richness of a diversity of peoples and cultural traditions in their Semitic and Romance branches. Our affinity with Britain is also something that allowed us to develop a cosmopolitan outlook, while our American experience has given us the edge by which so many people have moved across the world and learnt how to believe in the infinite possibilities that the world gives one.
You haven't been to Malta for around 20 years. What are the changes that you like.... And those that you dislike?
I like the fact that the Maltese have shown their resilience and kept believing in themselves and in their country. However there is a streak in the Maltese imaginary that I tend to dislike, in that often the same resilience that we have, turns into its opposite and we lose faith in our achievements. I also do not like those who choose to close their eyes and fail to see Malta as being great because it belongs to a wider world. Malta has been successful whenever it remained open to a wider world and the Maltese all over the world have been successful because they carry their resilience within them in a way that gives them the ability to integrate in other societies while still claiming aspects of their unique identity. This is best demonstrated in how we developed our own approach to the arts, to music and to all aspects by which we express ourselves. Our own language singles us out while it keeps us within the various strands that come together. This is what makes Maltese history unique and this is where we have been successful - as Mediterraneans we know that our strength lies in being engaged with everyone because we represent the diversity of what makes us human - culturally, existentially and in all manner imaginable.
Does your repertoire only consist of contemporary music?
Not at all.My repertoire is comprehensive and I play standard repertoire alongside the contemporary repertoire. I love performing Baroque music alongside contemporary music in the same program and I also perform many concerts of Romantic and classical repertoire.
You are an educator, too. Have you any suggestions as to how we can pull young people into the theatre to listen to classical music?
As well as being an Artist faculty at Columbia University, I have also taught at Universities like the CUNY system and now also at NYU.
There are many ways of getting young audiences enthused into attending classical music concerts. For instance I have also worked in music outreach as a Teaching artist. In New York, classical music ensembles as well as orchestras including the New York Philharmonic and the American Composers Orchestra, with whom I have worked on Music outreach projects, engage teaching artists to work for them in the community, or partnering with schools, working with them over the course of the year. Many times the students would be following a programme the climax of which would be attending a concert. This contextualizes the music and prepares the students for the concert experience. Other programmes involve students working on compositions with Teaching artists that are then chosen to be performed by the Professional orchestra/ensemble itself. This gets young people involved directly in the concert experience.
(The MPO, under the baton of Christoph Gedschold will be presenting an enriching programme celebrating Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius on the 150th anniversary of their birth (1865). This concert will be held at the Manoel Theatre on 11th December at 8pm and will also welcome Maltese national flautist Laura Falzon, who will be performing one of Nielsen's celebrated concertos.)