Galway Flouts Convention to Great Effect

A James Galway concert is what it is--part comedy show, part serious music-making, part circus act. But there’s no need to harp on its lack of purity, its meshing of the high and low.

Because there’s nothing phony about it, no reaching or selling, no calculating effect, no pretensions of grandeur. Or if there is, Galway hides it well. Simply put, the man appears to genuinely enjoy playing the flute in front of an audience, joshing a bit, showing off some. Take it or leave it.

At the end of his recital Saturday night in Veterans Wadsworth Theater--after a Friday recital in Minnesota, preceding a Sunday stop in Seattle--when most performers would have packed it in, applause diminishing, hour late, Galway kept coming back for more--four encores in all.

With Phillip Moll his engaging collaborator, Galway began with Schubert’s Introduction and Variations on “Trockne Blumen,” glowingly outlined, but whose unhurried unwinding made for a slow start. Galway’s transcription of Faure’s Violin Sonata No. 1 remained a valiant try, the flute’s character unable to capture its roiling, heroic, pungent romanticism.

But with Widor’s Opus 34 Suite, a disarming work that exploits the instrument’s qualities to the full, the 56-year-old musician hit pay dirt and performed it with elegance and dash. Briccialdi’s “The Carnival of Venice” provided an impressive show of whirring speed and accuracy, Doppler’s “Airs Valaques” of Viennese charm and balletic grace. In encore, Mancini’s “Penny Whistle Jig” (played on a $450 penny whistle), Godard’s Waltz, “Danny Boy” and “Flight of the Bumblebee” weren’t merely tossed off, but relished every note of the way.