19th Annual Summer Metropolitan Flute Festival Orchestra

Jennifer Kramer
Jill Krawiecki
Bonnie Krims
Jennifer Lehman
Jennifer Long
Elise Locker
Kimberly McKanna
Marie Nagode
Eve-Marie Nezich
Roberta Nicoletta
Lisa Norton
Nicole O’Toole
Julie Pasquino
Lois Reynolds
Ruth Robertson
Gretchen Schlier
Mariellen Sears
Gabriel Shipe
Barbara Skaggs
Michele Smith
Martha Tangney
Linda True Stromski
Annie Wang
Alison Weinstock

Alto Flute
Stephanie Abend
Elaine Allen
Deborah Rebeck Ash
Hannah Bitterman
Anne Carr
Noreen Friedman
Lenore Gelb
Margaret Howard
Cheryl Lionarons
Jennifer Long
Brenda Meehan
Elaine Olmstead
Francine Pancost
Peggy Preusch
Debra Schild
Lynne Sugar
Carol Sugimoto
Betty Whyte

Bass Flute
Liz Crane-Wexler
Judy Diez d’Aux
Kelly Gallivan
Jeanne Giblin
Jeanne Hebert
Doris Hall
Jean MacAloney
Ellis O’Donnell
Serge Paul-Emile
Carol Peabody
Gret Price
Joseph Saenz
Kathryn Sheehan
Mary Stojak
Martin Tentor

Contrabass Flute
Kenneth Beauchamp
Jonathan Cohen
Earl Grant Lawrence
Laura Gustavsen
Alice Mullins
Shari Shaw
Jay V. Kast-Tuttle
Maria Ramey
Martha Uhey
Eileen Yarrison

Sub Contrabass
Flute in G
Kathy Craven

Double Contrabass
Flute in C
Paige Dashner Long

Sit back and relax as the Metropolitan Flute Festival Orchestra transports you to spectacular nature scenes around the world as we present Flora, Fauna and Flute.

Across the Divide, by Larry Tuttle, is a musical bridge – spanning the gap between two contrasting elements. The first element is a bright rhythmic melody, in the manner of a reel or fiddle tune. The second element is a broad, spacious, and noble chorale. The piece starts right out of the gate with the driving melody, followed by several spunky and aggressive variations. The energy and the size of the orchestration keeps growing and building with each variation, leading eventually to the climactic moment, when the rhythmic melody and the chorale play simultaneously. The slow-moving chorale unfolds majestically, while the faster tune moves up in the register and soars over the top. A brief and reflective slow section follows, before an energetic and speedy coda pops up unexpectedly, taking us to the end. Larry Tuttle writes iconic and optimistic music with a strong sense of story and narrative arc. He is the winner of the Pittsburgh Symphony’s H.J. Heinz Company Audience of the Future Composition Competition, and his concert overture, By Steam or By Dream, won second prize at the Keuris Composers Competition in The Netherlands. Larry is also known as one of the world’s foremost composers and performers of music for the Chapman Stick.

The first movement of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, “Spring,” is often described as the most famous of this prolific composer’s works. The music is based upon a sonnet that reads: “Spring has arrived, and joyfully the birds greet her with glad song, while at Zephyr’s breath the streams flow forth with a sweet murmur. Her chosen heralds, thunder and lightning, come to envelope the air in a black cloak; once they have fallen silent, the little birds return anew to their melodious songs.” This sonnet, possibly written by Vivaldi himself, gives a description of what the listener will hear. The famous bird calls are accompanied by murmuring streams, with interruptions of thunder and lightning.

MET contrabass flutist and award winning composer, Jonathan Cohen, wrote Land of Arctic Fire after he completed a concert tour to Iceland with the Metropolitan Flute Orchestra in 2018. Each movement offers impressions of Iceland: Just Below the Surface – water, steam and lava fulminate and explode through the thin crust; Glacier – vast, timeless, cold; Cascade – hundreds of thousands of tiny rivers cascade down hills and mountains into valleys and plains; Valley Dawn – green riparian valleys are breathtaking; Volcanics and Vikings – grand, energetic, determined, old and new. The Metropolitan Flute Orchestra is very fortunate that Jon is part of our mighty contra section. With a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, he has worked as a researcher in information retrieval and visualization, optical and signal processing, and related fields, for four decades. His resulting trophies include more than a dozen patents and a bald head.

On July 30, 1829, while visiting Scotland, 20 year old Felix Mendelssohn was inspired to compose what is now known as Symphony No 3 in A Minor, “Scottish.” He wrote home to his family: “In darkening twilight today, we went to the Palace [of Holyrood] where Queen Mary lived and loved. The chapel beside it has lost its roof and is overgrown with grass and ivy, and at that broken altar Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland. Everything there is ruined, decayed and open to the clear sky. I believe that I have found there today the beginning of my Scotch Symphony.” Mendelssohn’s fascination with Mary Queen of Scots and Scottish history are important factors in understanding his Scottish Symphony. At the beginning of the 4th movement that will be performed today, Allegro vivacissimo, the listener will hear battle calls in reference to a poem written by family friend Karl Klingemann, that mentions the Battle of Killiecrankie of 1689 and the Jacobite uprising in 1745. The music of the last movement of the symphony, originally marked Allegro Guerriero, is fast and warlike, suggesting a battle, with syncopated rhythms in the upper voices with an underlying soldiers march from the lower instruments. Musical passages conjure up the chaos of combat until later in the movement when the music almost halts. A new theme emerges from the lower voices, in A major, and gradually rises up, as if going to the tops of the Scottish Highlands, celebrating victory in a triumphal finish.

One of Paige Dashner Long’s newer compositions, Flutenado is a flutistic meterological musical wonder, inspired by Florida storms and beautiful beaches. One has heard of ‘Sharknado’ and is familiar with ‘tornado,’ so Flutenado is a flutey combination of both. At the beginning you will hear sounds of the ocean, complete with bird calls. A calm, lazy day at the beach soon changes as storm clouds roll in, with gusts of wind subsiding into moments of calm. Then, the storm breaks loose into a flurry of rain, wind, and waves. With relief, the storm ends quickly, just as the daily Florida summer thunderstorms pop up and then pass through quickly.

Squirrels, by Herman Beeftink, is an energetic, delightful piece that musically features squirrels scampering around your background. Listen to them artfully jumping from tree to tree, wildly changing directions in an instant. Beeftink is a Dutch-American composer born in the Netherlands. Immigrating to the United States in 1982, he lives in southern California where he has worked as a studio musician and now composes for film and television. He has played keyboards for many popular TV shows including Cheers, five seasons of Roseanne, and all episodes of Home Improvement.

Composer Johannes Hanssen began writing Valdres March in 1901. The title suggests both geographic and musical connotations. Valdres is a beautiful scenic region between Bergen and Oslo, Norway, that is home to the Valdres Battalion in the Valdres valley. The opening march theme is a bugle call from the Valdres Battalion. Next you will hear an old tune for hardanger fiddle, which is considered to be the national instrument of Norway. The trio section is a pentatonic tune based upon Norwegian folk music, which is played above a drone bass line. Although it was his first composition, Hanssen considered Valdres one of his best compositions.

Peter Senchuk’s Under the Sun is a jazzy samba, full of syncopation and musical surprises. Bass flutes and contrabass flutes begin with a driving theme, soon to be joined by the alto flutes. The sun erupts with the bright entry of the concert flutes and piccolo. During the middle section, two MET flutists and jazz musicians, Earl Grant Lawrence and Joseph Saenz, are featured performing their own improvisations over the rhythm section. Just as with the beginning, the ending section is led by the low flutes, before trilling concert flutes and rhythmic piccolo bring the piece to a thrilling end.

Legendary composer and conductor, John Philip Sousa’s The Thunderer march was dedicated in 1889 to the Columbia Commandery No. 2, Knights of Templar, of Washington, DC, a philanthropic order affiliated with Freemasonry. Also known as the March King, Sousa was “knighted” by the Columbia Commandery three years earlier. Of the 136 marches that Sousa composed, The Thunderer was Mrs. Sousa’s favorite march. During his time, the composer was a pop star of national and international fame.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee quickly made this flying bug the most famous musical insect. Based on a fairy tale opera, The Tale of the Tsar Sultan, the libretto was written by Vladimir Belsky and was based on a poem by Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin. Although the opera has long been forgotten, the Flight of the Bumblee lives on as a celebrated virtuoso showpiece in its many different transcriptions for solo instruments ranging all the way from piccolo to tuba. In today’s performance for flute orchestra, the flashy chromatic lines are shared among all of the players from piccolo through double contrabass flute.