British Flute Society Convention – DAY 2

Well, needless to say I didn’t make it to the warm up this morning at 7am but I did manage to catch an early lecture on performance anxiety with Mary lee Cochran from the psychology department of Kansas State University. This was followed by a recital by two horribly attractive and talented flautists, Kayoko Minamino and Zsuzsa Vamosi-Nagy, titled fresh faces – fresh music.

Next up I had to decide between watching Mike Mower perform a selection of his compositions or a talk on basic flute maintainance by the resident repairer Arthur Haswell. The later was probably a bit of a mistake as obviously Arthur didn’t want to encourage a bunch of flute teachers to start fiddling around with their students instruments! However i did learn that cleaning your teeth prior to playing the flute is just as bad as drinking a can of coke. The afternoon consisted of a recital by the flautist Silvia Careddu and a fantastic performance by a flute choir from Italy called Joueurs de flute which consisted of all types of flutes including the contra bass. This was followed by two flute trios. The first were an English trio who played works by Boismortier and Gary Shocker. The second were three young men from japan who dressed up as monkeys
complete with bright red backsides and proceeded to run around the concert hall playing thier flutes through their noses. Brilliant! I’m sure you can guess which one I prefered. Seriously though the Japanese trio who call themselves the Magnum trio were awesome. They used various
flutes and special remodelled instruments and headjoints and had composed all the pieces themselves which contained loads of unusual
techniques. Personally I liked it when they stuck kazoos in the end of thier flutes. It made them all sound like Sweep!

After this I went to hear Andy Findon talk about playing the flute in the comercial world, which proved to be a very informative and entertaining chat about his life as a session musician and doubler in the west end. Anyway since then i have listened to a piccolo recital (ouch!) another piece by Gary Shocker for flute and piano (played at the same time) and another recital by the amazing Marco Grando. I’m  going to have a break now but Ill go back in a bit to see some more Andy Findon, a recital by William Bennett, a talk about the Dopplers and their musical effects and not forgetting late night yoga!
JBD

Julia Bentley Dawkes
www.suzukiflute.co.uk