Tucson flutist making summer concert series debut

Tucson flutist Zach Warren is making his St. Andrew’s Bach Society debut on Sunday, July 16, with works he’s never played before, and one piece Tucson has likely never heard live.

“It’s exciting. ... I had a lot of freedom to choose different things and I wanted to think what would be interesting for the audience and for me to invest a lot of time learning,” said Warren, who has played flute and piccolo with the Tucson Symphony Orchestra since 2019. “I tried to choose pieces that felt a little bit special, a little out of the ordinary.”

Sunday’s concert, which features Warren and longtime Tucson pianist Michael Dauphinais, is the second installment of St. Andrew’s Bach Society‘s 2023 summer series, which opened in June with the greatest hits of the string quartet repertoire.

Warren’s program opens with French composer Lili Boulanger’s haunting and powerful “D’un Matin de Printemps” (Of A Spring Morning). It was one of the last pieces Boulanger composed before her death at 24, and the work surely would have been forgotten if not for her sister Nadia Boulanger, the French music teacher and conductor who taught some of the 20th-century’s most important composers, including Americans Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Philip Glass and Quincy Jones and Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla.

Musicologist James Keller described the work in program notes for the San Francisco Symphony as having “vibrant energy and surpassing delicacy, strikingly in mode of the French ‘Impressionist’ composers.” Warren said the piece, originally written for violin and piano but transcribed early on for flute, doesn’t sound hopeful or happy, “but there’s a liveliness to it, a youth to it.”

“In terms of the harmony, its a little more complex, a little bit of intrigue to it,” he added, saying that listeners on Sunday will likely pick up on “something a little unusual to the harmonies.”

Warren also programmed the Tucson premiere of Valerie Coleman’s 2018 “Fanmi Imèn,” a poem for piano and flute.

“Immediately when I knew I was going to be doing this program I knew I wanted to play one of the pieces Valerie Coleman had written for flute,” said Warren, who worked with Coleman, a flutist and one of the founders of the prestigious Imani Winds, when he was an undergrad at the University of South Carolina.

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He landed on “Fanmi Imén” (Human Family) partly due to his love of the Maya Angelou epic poem of the same name that inspired Coleman. The Angelou poem includes the uplifting refrain, “We are more alike, my friends/Than we are unalike.”

“This piece really runs the gamut, slow and lyrical and some fast and exciting, with a cadenza in the middle,” Warren said, adding that the piece is lively and exciting with lots of contrasts.

French-German 20th century composer Walter Giesking’s Sonatine for Flute and Piano, a harmonically unconventional piano-flute piece reminiscent of Ravel and Poulenc, and American composer Amy Beach’s Sonata in A minor for violin and piano transcribed for flute round out the program.

Warren said his choice of three women composers alongside Giesking was intentional.

“These are composers that the general concertgoer is probably not familiar with their style and their musical language,” he said. “I think there is something about getting people in a room and listening intentionally. ... I think it’s like going to a movie theater where everyone in the room will have the same experience at the same time. (As musicians,) we get to bring to life the sounds that were in the composer’s head and we get to share that as a community.”

Sunday’s concert begins at 2 p.m. at Grace St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 2331 E. Adams St. Tickets are $15, $25 for premium through standrewsbach.org or at the door.