Five Whimsies for Flute & Piano 

Program Notes

Five Whimsies began as a work for my younger sister, Lisa, then a flutist in high school, and Awakening was written as a 15th birthday present for her in 1976. As the rest of the pieces progressed, I began to think of them more as performance pieces for me. In fact, I premiered Sally’s Wedding as the bride’s processional at my cousin Sally Boni’s wedding in 1977.

For many years entitled Five Little Pieces—a sort of grad-student joke, since when used in German (Fünf Kleine Stücke) for the title of a Webern work, it sounds profound to us Americans—I retitled it when I realized that flutists took its name to mean that the pieces are easy. But in the same way that Schumann’s Kinderszenen conveys the naivete and playfulness of childhood without actually being easy to play, these pieces are intended for a flutist with chops.

Mark Carlson, flute
Sanaz Rezai, piano
Recorded October 4 & 5, 2017, at the Ostin Recording Studio, UCLA
Benjamin Maas, recording engineer