IN CASE OF WAR, TAKE A BREATH : But Chamber Music Supplanted Military Band for Flutist

If war had intervened, Gary Schocker might be playing flute with a military band instead of pursuing a classical career.

“My father wanted me to learn the flute because, in the advent of a war, I could play at West Point in the band,” Schocker, 33, says. “That’s what he did.”

But war didn’t come and instead of being in a military band, he’s soloing with the chamber group I Solisti Italiani on a tour that stops Friday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa. The program is sponsored by the Philharmonic Society.

The flute actually is Schocker’s second instrument. Like many kids, he first studied the piano. But his father’s prompting and lessons he had as a teen-ager with famed flutist Julius Baker settled the matter.

“It was no longer a question of what I would do,” he says.

He picked up his flute and headed off to the Juilliard School in New York.

“After I got to Juilliard, I found that I missed the piano, so I also studied that instrument with Earl Wild.

“The piano is such a great lion of an instrument. It is capable of gorgeous color and expression, and it does have the Romantic intensity. The flute really isn’t a heroic instrument. It can have heroic moments, but you don’t want to hear a strident, loud flute. For me, the beauty of the flute is in the triple-piano to mezzo-piano range.”

But even playing two instruments isn’t enough for Schocker. He also composes.

“I have a real predilection for tonal music,” he says. “I like to write shows. But right now, the economic climate of Broadway is such that they’re not producing a lot of unknowns. So I started writing classical music instead.”

One of his classical pieces, “Airborne,” will be on the Friday program. The work, composed for Baker’s 75th birthday, is in two parts and lasts about 12 minutes.

“The first part is really almost a pop song,” he says. “The second part is a flashing Italian dance. I almost called it ‘Song and Dance.’ My flute repair person christened it.”

Schocker will also be soloist in Vivaldi’s “Goldfinch” Concerto, Opus 10, No. 3, in an alternative version of the piece that can also be played as a violin concerto.

“Most people know only Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ because they play that on the radio every 14 minutes,” he says. “But he wrote some other really neat things, even if they’re really hard to play.”

Why?

“Because the patterns are so obvious that if everything isn’t clear and even, the glitches are very obvious. It’s much more difficult than you’d think to play well.”

As for managing to take a breath now and then during those complicated patterns, Schocker isn’t troubled. “When you get involved in the music, the lines are so gorgeous, you forget about how difficult they are. You just breathe. Of course, it all depends how many hours you’ve spent on the bus that day, too.”