Music : Putting a Finger on the Nuances of the Flutist

Flutist Elizabeth Mann says the question put to her most frequently has nothing to do with the status of women in classical music or whether classical music has any future in the late 20th Century.

It’s “How do you pronounce flutist ?”

“I prefer flewtist to floutist, “ Mann said in a recent phone interview from her home in New York City. “Most of my colleagues also prefer flewtist. But it is the most common question asked.”

At least one interviewer had the grace to wait about 10 minutes into the conversation to ask it. Fortunately, Mann, who will be soloist with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s led by Andre Previn on Tuesday in Costa Mesa, took it all in good humor.

Mann, born and raised in Boston, is the only musician in her family. “I am absolutely the black sheep,” she said. “You can look down the family line--nothing, a black hole . . . in the music department. They’ve never known a musician.”

The closest anyone came was her mother, a music critic for a local paper. Her father is a chemical engineer and an inventor. Her brother, four years older, is a lawyer whose sole musical achievement, she said, was “learning ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ on the guitar.”

Mann, 35, was mesmerized as a child by the sound of a flute.

She began playing in school orchestras. “But I never thought I was going to do that as a profession.”

What set her on that path was winning a concerto competition when she was 12. Her prize was the opportunity to play the Mozart Flute Concerto No. 1 with the Boston Symphony. It is the same concerto she will play for Tuesday’s Orange County Philharmonic Society-sponsored concert.

“That’s the last time I played it--until about two weeks ago in Washington,” she said. “There are two other flute concertos written by Mozart. I’ve played those a fair amount. This one skipped over me.”

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Mann studied at the Juilliard School with the great flutist Julius Baker. But in her second year, her studies were interrupted when she was badly injured in a car accident.

“I wondered what would happen to me as I was in the hospital, in traction,” she said. “I couldn’t play the flute for nine months. That was one of the key moments of my life, when I realized what I did was so special, when it was taken away from me. When I got back to flute playing, I felt that something had changed for me. Then I felt it was really my choice.”

She auditioned for a group Michael Feldman was forming in 1974, which became the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble. Feldman named the group after the church on Hudson Street in New York City where the musicians first played. Mann became the new group’s principal flutist.

“There were 14 of us,” she said. “We started without a conductor. We were really a chamber music group. Then it grew a little.”

It grew into a chamber orchestra in 1979 to play at the Caramoor Festival in Katonah, N.Y. “The next thing we knew,” she said, it seemed as if “anyone who wanted do a concert wanted our orchestra.”

The group appeared at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for the New York premiere of John Adams’ “Nixon in China” and for Lou Harrison’s “Strict Songs” with the Mark Morris Dance Company; at Carnegie Hall for Joan Sutherland, for Handel’s “Orlando” led by Charles Mackerras and for “Ariodante” conducted by Raymond Leppard, and at other similarly prestigious concert sites.

Roger Norrington was appointed to a three-year contract in 1990 as the ensemble’s first music director. No one replaced him after his contract ran out. Previn has been a guest conductor since 1991.

“Even though we don’t perform on period instruments,” Mann said, “we do make an effort to play in the style of Mozart, in the style of Bach--a little less vibrato, a little lighter and a smaller orchestra, which suits us well because we’re a chamber ensemble.”

The Mozart concerto she will play is “not technically difficult,” she said, “but you can’t get away with anything. It’s just so pure--and there is the perfection of his placement of every note. So that’s a lot to pursue.

“And also the music has been played a lot. There’s something much more terrifying about playing Mozart than anything. But I’m working myself up. But it’s a lot of fun--and a lot of fun to play with my colleagues.”

Historical practice issues apparently have affected wind players less than string players. “One of the big issues,” however, “(is) whether the grace notes are played evenly or not,” Mann said. “There is absolutely no indication how they are to played. Depending on what kind of grouping or where you’re coming from leads us to believe it’s one way or another.”

Tempos are an issue too. Too many people take the slow movement of the Mozart flute concerto, Mann says, “much too slowly. It’s marked adagio non troppo-- not too slow. Musically, it can be almost deadly if it’s just milked to the point of the line being lost.”

One item that remains the same, however, is left to the performer--the cadenzas. Mann has written her own “because Mozart didn’t write any. And not one famous composer wrote a cadenza for the flute concertos either. So I thought I might as well put my hands in. As a composer, I don’t put myself anywhere on the map. But I thought it would be a good exercise.”

The biggest issue may be playing a work for an instrument the composer hated.

“It’s not true that Mozart hated the flute!” Mann said.

“I was reading Mozart’s letters. He didn’t like the guy (Dutch amateur musician Ferdinand Dejean) who commissioned the pieces. He wasn’t religious (like Dejean was). He felt pressured at the time and wanted to get out of that house. He wrote, ‘I hate the flute.’ Everybody runs with that comment. How could he have written one beautiful flute solo after another in the concertos and the symphonies if he hated it? So there!”

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Mann is busy as a guest soloist as well as playing in the St. Luke’s ensemble. Even so, she acknowledged that “it’s not so easy as a flutist. Had my parents told me there was no repertory for the flute, that it is limited, I might have had second thoughts.

“Still, this is probably the only instrument I could play. I can’t imagine picking up any other instrument. I heard a flute when I was young. I thought it was the most beautiful sound I ever heard. Some people have religion, and I have music. . . . When I put a flute in my hands, everything else just disappears.”

* Elizabeth Mann will be the soloist in Mozart’s Flute Concerto No. 1 with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s led by Andre Previn on Tuesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 8 p.m. Previn will also conduct Haydn’s Symphony No. 102 and Mozart’s Symphony No. 38 (“Prague”). The concert is sponsored by the Philharmonic Society. $17 to $45. (714) 553-2422.