CLASSICAL MUSIC / KENNETH HERMAN : Atherton’s Long Arm Snags Talent for Mainly Mozart

David Atherton has an enviable reputation as a recruiter. When the former music director of the San Diego Symphony was in the market for a new concertmaster, he lured Andres Cardenes to San Diego from his concertmaster post at the Utah Symphony while Atherton was guest conducting in Salt Lake City. When he needed to staff his inaugural Mainly Mozart Festival with a concertmaster and violin soloist, he borrowed another concertmaster he had encountered while guest conducting stateside.

“I met David when he was guest conducting with the Atlanta Symphony,” explained Atlanta’s concertmaster William Preucil. “We became friends--at least as much as you can in a week’s time.”

Since he enjoyed working with the energetic British conductor, Preucil accepted his San Diego invitation. At Atherton’s suggestion, he recruited several Atlanta colleagues for the local festival, including Martin Chalifour, the Atlanta Symphony’s associate concertmaster. Preucil’s wife, violinist Gwen Starker Preucil, is also performing in the Mainly Mozart orchestra.

“She is the concertmaster of the Atlanta Ballet Orchestra,” said Preucil, “although I should put that in the past tense, since their season is finished now, and we’ll of course be moving to Rochester next month.”

Preucil only recently decided to end his seven-year association with the Atlanta Symphony to become the Cleveland Quartet’s first violinist. In spite of its name, that 20-year-old chamber music ensemble is in residence at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y.

“I always wanted to play in a string quartet. My father was in a string quartet--actually he still is. One of the first things I did as a teen-ager was have a string quartet. The opportunity to play in a fine string quartet doesn’t come along very often, so, although I love playing in the orchestra, opportunity knocked now. The string quartet literature is probably some of the greatest of all to perform. Most composers saved their most intimate expressions for the string quartet.”

The 31-year-old Preucil did not reject the label of chamber music addict.

“While I was in the (Atlanta) orchestra, I played some 110 concerts a year, but I still managed to play at least 50 chamber music performances every year.”

Among his chamber music associations, Preucil played four seasons with the Minneapolis Artists Ensemble, a group that specialized in new music.

“Each program had one piece by a living composer, and many of them were brand new commissions.”

Minnesota composer Stephen Paulus has written three pieces for Preucil, including his Violin Concerto, which Preucil premiered with the Atlanta Symphony. The recording of the concerto is scheduled for release next year on New World Records.

When Preucil was on tour in the Soviet Union with members of the Seattle Chamber Music Festival last year, he played another Paulus composition written for him, the Partita for Violin and Piano. Paulus is now preparing a new chamber work for Preucil on commission from Atlanta’s Emory University, where the violinist will premiere it in the spring of 1990.

After he leaves San Diego, Preucil will play three more festivals on his summer docket.

“At the Music Festival of Florida in Sarasota, I’ll be giving some master classes to college students, as well as playing chamber music. After three weeks there, I go to Alaska’s Sitka Music Festival and finally to the Seattle Chamber Music Festival.”

Magic Flutes. UC San Diego flutist Sebastian Winston is attempting to do for the little-known bass flute what James Galway has done for the lowly penny whistle. In a recital Saturday night at UCSD’s Erickson Hall, Winston presented an entire program of works for solo bass flute, most of them commissioned by the performer.

The world premiere of resident composer Joji Yuasa’s “Terms of Temporal Detailing” was a virtual catalogue of bass flute sound effects, from buzzing multiphonics, or singing into the flute while playing, to abundant flutter-tonguing. Although the work’s organization is supposed to be a musical counterpart to painter David Hockney’s photographic collages, it would require repeated hearings to obtain an overall aural impression of Yuasa’s tightly telescoped thematic fragments.

More alluring to the ear, but no less probing, was Chaya Czernowin Shwartz’s “Ina” for bass flute and prepared tape. The composer clustered shimmering spirals of recorded flute sounds around the angular solo line. Like other works from this promising young composer, “Ina” invited the listener into its complex sonic world, an atypical virtue of most new music.

Musical Benefits. This week offers several possibilities to combine musical pleasure and philanthropy. On Wednesday, San Diego’s Orpheus Ensemble will present an evening of baroque vocal and instrumental music to benefit the cancer-stricken Leucadia youngster Josh Kaplan. Soprano Kathryn Evans and tenor David Meek will each sing a Bach solo cantata in St. James Catholic Church, Solana Beach, to raise funds to help pay for the screening of potential bone-marrow donors for Kaplan.

On Saturday, members of Del Mar’s Romero family will hold forth at San Diego’s First Unitarian Church to benefit the research programs of the National Vision Research Institute in Point Loma. Noted classical guitarist Pepe Romero will be joined by his mother, Angelita, and his daughter, Angelina, in a concert of traditional Spanish and South American music.

Each concert begins at 7:30 p.m.