Flutist to perform with Utah Symphony

Next weekend, the Utah Symphony performs the second installment of its "Midsummer Mozart" concerts, featuing Mozart — and a little bit more.

While the second half of the concert will consist of Mozart's Symphony No. 29, conductor Scott O'Neil said the first half will be all about the flute, beginning with the overture to Mozart's opera "The Magic Flute," and ending with a performance of Joan Tower's Flute Concerto and Griffes' Poem for Flute and Orchestra by flutist Christina Jennings.

"Audiences are so used to hearing violin and piano and cello, or string quartets in their regular concerts, that they don't think of the flute of being a solo instrument," Jennings said during a telephone interview with the Deseret Morning News. "I feel like I have this reason for wanting to get out there, and playing my flute, and I have something to say. . . .

"I decided that, really, my true calling at this point is performing. As much as I love teaching, the thing that I really want to be doing now is performing, and generating ideas about performing, and how the flute can fit into the classical world."

Jennings is just the person to do it.

With musicians for parents, Jennings grew up in a musical home, albeit a non-traditional one. "My dad played a lot of new music, and so I came to really understand that kind of tonal language. Not only was I growing up with Beethoven quartets, but I was also growing up with Feldman music."

Jennings went on to get her undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Juilliard School of Music, where she had the opportunity of studying with Carol Wincenc, who commissioned the Tower flute concerto. "The piece has a lot of (Wincenc's) personality in it," Jennings said of the work. "It was written with her in mind. We worked very closely on it when I was at Juilliard, to get the symbolism, and to get the things that (Tower) spoke to (Wincenc) about — exactly what her ideas were on the piece. I feel like I've really gotten it from the master, so to speak."

The piece, she says, starts out very mellow, then builds and builds, kind of like one gigantic crescendo. "Tower has done a wonderful job of writing very idiomatically for the instrument in the sense that there's never any balance problems," said Jennings. "She's orchestrated it beautifully. It's a great piece."

Not coincidentally, O'Neil had a chance to hear Jennings perform the concerto when she began work on her doctorate at Rice University, where he was also a student. "I just knew her to be a phenomenal flutist," O'Neil said.