MUSIC REVIEW : Piccinini in Gold Medal Recital

Flutist Marina Piccinini is a physically very demonstrative performer, producing an equally active and outgoing quality in her music. In her Gold Medal recital at Ambassador Auditorium Monday evening, she revealed a distinct and engaging personality.

Her strong, characterful program was not all trills and sighs. At its core lay the vivid, potent early Sonatina of Pierre Boulez.

Piccinini reveled in its fierce contrasts. Holding nothing back, she found that its serial complexities charted a course of high drama, which she projected with expressive elan. Along the way, she clarified rhythmic and metrical relationships, underscored the organic formal development and pointed motivic permutations carefully.

In that she had the full partnership of pianist Andreas Haefliger, the Juilliard-trained son of tenor Ernst Haefliger. He played an active role in the drama, and seconded Piccinini’s ideas with sensitivity and technical authority throughout the evening.

The Canadian-American flutist commands a wide timbral range, occasionally overly grainy in the lower register, and an equal variety of articulation, supported with prodigious breath control. She explored the gamut of lyrical poignancy and pyrotechnical bravura in Schubert’s “Trock’ne Blumen” Variations, made an evocative epic of Jolivet’s “Chant de Linos” and sang tenderly and sorrowfully in Schumann’s Opus 94 Romances.

A Sonata adapted from Mozart’s Oboe Quartet in F, K.370, began the program, vigorously dancing in its outer movements, sighing with exquisitely restrained passion in the central Adagio. In encore, Piccinini came full circle, offering an arrangement of Mozart’s “Ah, vous dirai-je, maman” Variations.