GREENBERG ENSEMBLE : NAME DOES NOT MEAN SHE RULES

“A pianist can have it all, but a flute needs other people,” flutist Susan Greenberg says.

Greenberg was explaining in a recent phone interview how the Greenberg Ensemble, which will perform at 3:30 p.m. Sunday at Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton, was born four years ago.

“I was the one who got people together initially,” Greenberg said. “It was very spontaneous and an excuse to play some chamber music.

“But we don’t always go by this name. Sometimes we are just known as members of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. It’s very democratic and not a power thing on my part at all.”

In addition to Greenberg, the ensemble is composed of violinist Jacqueline Brand, violist Janet Lakatos and cellist Douglas Davis. (Lakatos and Davis hold principal chair positions with LACO. Brand also is concertmaster of the Orange County Chamber Orchestra.) They will be joined Sunday by guitarist James Smith, director of classical guitar studies at USC.

The free concert, part of the Fullerton Friends of Music 28th annual series, will include works by Mozart, Dohnanyi, Roussel, Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Peter Maxwell Davies.

Like many musicians, the Greenberg players are involved in all aspects of music-making: performing chamber music, playing in large groups, pursuing solo careers, teaching and studio work.

“I’m not sure why people do all these things--besides the fact that (orchestra members) don’t earn a lot of money,” she said. Greenberg, however, likes to do all those things because “I was always motivated by love and involvement with music.”

Greenberg, born in Oakland, Calif., began playing the piano when she was 7 and the flute when she was 8. She continued with both instruments until she was 15, when composer Gerhard Samuel, guest-conducting her high school honor orchestra, advised her: “Pianists are a dime a dozen. I think you should concentrate on the flute.”

“That was the turning point,” she said.

Still, she didn’t think of making a career as a performer. She went on to get bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music history from UCLA “just so that I would have something to fall back on.”

But her professional career had already begun while she was studying. She began performing with the Roger Wagner Chorale (now the Los Angeles Master Chorale) in 1964, and she toured with Wagner’s group in 1965 and 1966. Later, she joined the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the Glendale Symphony. She has recorded for Crystal and Angel records.

For the past four years, she has been teaching at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.

As a musician, Greenberg finds studio work challenging. “You don’t know what the day will bring,” she said. “You show up with your instrument, and 99% of the time you have to sight read perfectly,” she said. “That can be easy or very difficult. (Sound tracks for) cartoons are particularly challenging because you have to get the character right in the music.” Recent movies Greenberg has worked on include “Three Amigos” and “Star Trek IV.” She also has worked on television dramas such as “Murder, She Wrote.”

Greenberg likens playing chamber music to “some sort of a marriage.

“We stop and discuss things,” she said. “But as we play together more, we also arrive at solutions in nonverbal ways.

“Any music played well and beautifully is difficult,” Greenberg said. “Some pieces we’ll be playing are challenging technically, no question. But communication as an ensemble--getting across nuances of balances, phrasings--that’s the difficult thing.”