MUSIC / HERBERT GLASS : No Time to Drop a Beat : Flutist’s Hectic Schedule Includes Date With Mozart

Tracking down Louise Di Tullio, principal flutist of the Pacific Symphony, is no easy matter.

Despite the fact that she has phone numbers in Los Angeles, Glendale, Orange County and Santa Barbara, it took the better part of a week to make contact with this musician who is also a member of the new Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and the Pasadena Symphony and has recently started teaching at Santa Barbara’s Music Academy of the West.

When she did take time for an interview, it was during a rehearsal break at the Hollywood Bowl, where she was handling principal flute duties with the new pops orchestra that is sharing the summer outdoor season with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. They were preparing for a recent Gershwin concert and its subsequent recording for the Philips label.

“There are many players from the Pacific Symphony in the Bowl Orchestra,” said Di Tullio, who performs Mozart’s Concerto in G, K. 313, in the Pacific’s Mozart program tonight under guest conductor William McGlaughlin. She said the overlap is largely because John Mauceri, music director of the Bowl Orchestra, has conducted members of the Pacific in several performances for which they have played in the pit for Opera Pacific.

Di Tullio’s career is typical of the full-time Southland free-lance instrumentalist: She is a regular studio player and a member of one or more symphony orchestras.

It’s been that way for the Los Angeles native for three decades, since, barely out of her teens and already a member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, she was principal flutist of the Columbia Symphony, the group formed to record the music of Igor Stravinsky under the composer’s direction for Columbia Records.

The subject proved timely as Sony Classical, which now owns the Columbia catalogue, is about to re-release these early 1960s recordings in a package of 22 compact discs.

“Doing the Stravinsky was a terrific and in some ways scary experience,” the dark-haired, animated flutist said. “I’d only seen a flute about eight years earlier. I was a piano student starting at age four. I’m from two musical families. My dad was a cellist in the L.A. Philharmonic, and I was the fourth member of my family to enter the Philharmonic before the age of 20. Other relatives on both sides were professional musicians in Southern California and, before that, in Italy.”

About the Stravinsky sessions, she remembered particularly “The Firebird,” “Pulcinella,” “Agon,” above all “The Fairy’s Kiss.”

Why did “The Fairy’s Kiss” stand out?

“Well, I’d never even heard the music before I sat down to play it for the recording,” she said. “I’ll never forget being in the studio, exhausted, my jaw breaking--it’s a murderous score--and when I wasn’t playing, furiously taking notes on what to do when we went through it again, where I should breathe and so on.

“We got to the end of the read-through and John McClure, the producer, says from the booth, ‘Splendid. That’s it. Now we can go home.’ I couldn’t believe it! But evidently it had been everything he wanted. Anyway, everyone was trying to save Stravinsky’s strength. He was about 80 and very frail. So, that recording--people commented on how polished and lively that playing was--was of a sight-reading session!” she said.

Asked about a long-circulated rumor that Stravinsky was more puppet than music director at those sessions and that the strings were being pulled by his assistant, Robert Craft, Di Tullio frowned, pondered and admitted: “There were times when they would tell Stravinsky we were finished with a session. So he’d leave and then Bob Craft would do some cleaning up with us. But other times Stravinsky was right up on top of things.”

She glanced at her watch, intent on not dropping a beat in her schedule, and mentioned that she has come in for Bowl rehearsals from Santa Barbara, where she is serving her first summer on the faculty of the Music Academy of the West.

The commute, she said, “can be exhausting. But that’s the way things worked out. I thought I’d eventually go back to teaching--I taught flute at USC for 14 years--but I didn’t think it would be this soon. . . . The opportunity to be (at the academy) came earlier rather than later. You can’t always pick your time.”

When she began doing studio session work in the ‘60s, she said, it was “to supplement my income from the philharmonic. Once, when I was doing my income taxes, I realized that I was putting in all these hours with the orchestra, not really playing much and already making more on the outside than in the orchestra, in less time. If the principal position had opened up the philharmonic, I’d have loved that. But it didn’t happen for me, so I got heavily involved in film and television studio work and playing for many years with the California Chamber Symphony and, since 1978, the Pasadena Symphony, where I’m principal flute, too.”

During her early studio days, Di Tullio found particular satisfaction in collaborating with veteran composer-conductor Alfred Newman on such films as “How the West Was Won,” “The Diary of Anne Frank,” “Camelot,” “South Pacific” and “Airport.”

Among recent soundtracks she has played on are John Williams’ score for “Home Alone,” John Barry’s “Dances With Wolves” and those from two Julia Roberts films, “Sleeping With the Enemy” and “Dying Young,” both written by one of Hollywood’s hottest composers, James Newton Howard.

Referring to her current shuttling between the Bowl and the Pacific Symphony, she wondered “how everyone is going to reconcile that down the road both orchestras will become more successful and give more concerts. The Bowl orchestra is going to tour. . . . Somebody like me really has to stand back and decide what her priorities are.”

“I think the Pacific Symphony has a great future. . . . And look, I even enjoyed myself when the orchestra wasn’t what it is today. Keep in mind, I’ve been with them since 1981. The most important thing then was to do more big-orchestra, serious repertory, whoever the conductor was. I’m not putting down chamber music or the best film scores. But there’s something missing when you don’t do the big stuff.”

Symphonic music still isn’t the most profitable direction a musician can go in, Di Tullio said.

“For example, several of us in first-chair positions turned down very lucrative jobs elsewhere to play in the Pacific Symphony’s last subscription concert of the season,” she said. “I’m not sure we can keep doing that forever. But the fact that we do it means . . . we don’t regard the Pacific Symphony as just another job.”

About the Mozart concerto she will be playing with the orchestra tonight, Di Tullio said: “It’s the heart of the flute repertoire. Every student is expected to learn it. But it shouldn’t be brought in too early. It’s such naked, exposed music. Any little flaw or inconsistency in your technique will show. That’s why it’s still a challenge to me, and why I never get tired of playing it.”

As far as future solo assignments with the Pacific Symphony, she said she is fond of a baroque-flavored concerto by contemporary French composer Pierre Max Dubois that she’d like to suggest to music director Carl St. Clair, and a piece by composer David Rose, who died last August. “David and I did the piece with the Boston Pops and it went over very well,” she said. “I hope I can talk the Pacific Symphony into doing it at one of their pops concerts.”

For this week, however, Mozart is undoubtedly Louise Di Tullio’s, and the Pacific Symphony’s, main man.

Louise Di Tullio will join the Pacific Symphony and guest conductor William McGlaughlin for Mozart’s Flute Concerto No. 1 in G, K.313, at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, 8800 Irvine Center Drive, Irvine, tonight at 8. Also on the program: Mozart’s Overture to “The Impresario,” and Symphony No. 39. Tickets: $10 to $39. Information: (714) 740-2000 (Ticketmaster).