News & Stories

Flute Fighters: Piccinini and Haefliger Bring 3 Premieres, 35 Years of Marriage and a Kung Fu Background to Grant Park Concerts

August 2, 2022 | Hannah Edgar
[Reprinted from the Chicago Tribune]

Marina Piccinini pictured with her husband Andreas Haefliger

One imagines most couples follow a similar script for their 35th wedding anniversary: a nice dinner and a show, maybe a trip if they’re feeling adventurous. Marina Piccinini and Andreas Haefliger aren’t most couples. They might be visiting Chicago Aug. 5-12, but they are the show.

The flutist and pianist will be in town for a residency at the Grant Park Music Festival; between them, they’ll play three of the six world premieres included on this year’s festival roster. After that, Piccinini will perform and speak at the annual National Flute Association Convention (Aug. 11-14), with her premiere of Christopher Theofanidis’s bold, brand-new flute concerto with the Grant Park Festival Orchestra (Aug. 10) touted as a prelude to the conference.

That’s probably more work than most are willing to do on their anniversary weekend. But when the Tribune spoke by phone with Piccinini and Haefliger from their Baltimore apartment, the musicians were just happy to share a stage for their anniversary, much less a city — a “rare” occurrence, Haefliger said. In addition to his solo career, Haefliger has become a regular recital partner for violinist Hilary Hahn, artist-in-residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra through 2023, with whom he performed at Symphony Center in the spring. Piccinini also maintains a busy touring schedule — most recently with the Chicago-based father-daughter duo Sérgio and Clarice Assad, with whom she’s performing on Oct. 2 at the University of Chicago — as well as a full flute studio at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, where she teaches.

“We don’t play together all the time, Andreas and I,” Piccinini affirmed. “He has his solo career, and I have mine. That’s what makes this so special.”

The couple’s Aug. 7 recital will be far from the first time they’ve played works written for both of them to play together. But unlike their precedents, the two premieres on the Grant Park program are directly inspired by Piccinini and Haefliger’s union. John Harbison’s short, breezy “Mark the Date” was commissioned by a friend of the couple as an anniversary gift. Meanwhile, Swedish composer Tebogo Monnakgotla’s “It is the Lark That Sings” is more somber, a nod to the reality of weeks spent apart as touring musicians.

“When Romeo leaves Juliet (at her balcony), he says it’s the morning lark he hears singing, but she doesn’t want him to go, so she says, ‘No, it’s the nightingale,’” Piccinini says. “And birds are always associated with the flute, which helps.”

Whenever Piccinini and Haefliger do play as duo partners, often it’s to perform the work closing out their recital: Pierre Boulez’s Sonatine for flute and piano (1946). The mazelike 15-minute work flirts with total serialism, a compositional process applying the 12-tone system — transforming a set of pitches in a methodical way — to note durations and dynamics.

“It always amazes me that people who are not interested in modern or contemporary music just love it,” Piccinini says. “It’s like an aural Jackson Pollock: You just have to throw yourself into it and be carried, and then it’s exciting.”

The couple’s Aug. 7 recital will be far from the first time they’ve played works written for both of them to play together. But unlike their precedents, the two premieres on the Grant Park program are directly inspired by Piccinini and Haefliger’s union. John Harbison’s short, breezy “Mark the Date” was commissioned by a friend of the couple as an anniversary gift. Meanwhile, Swedish composer Tebogo Monnakgotla’s “It is the Lark That Sings” is more somber, a nod to the reality of weeks spent apart as touring musicians.

“When Romeo leaves Juliet (at her balcony), he says it’s the morning lark he hears singing, but she doesn’t want him to go, so she says, ‘No, it’s the nightingale,’” Piccinini says. “And birds are always associated with the flute, which helps.”

Whenever Piccinini and Haefliger do play as duo partners, often it’s to perform the work closing out their recital: Pierre Boulez’s Sonatine for flute and piano (1946). The mazelike 15-minute work flirts with total serialism, a compositional process applying the 12-tone system — transforming a set of pitches in a methodical way — to note durations and dynamics.

“It always amazes me that people who are not interested in modern or contemporary music just love it,” Piccinini says. “It’s like an aural Jackson Pollock: You just have to throw yourself into it and be carried, and then it’s exciting.”

The Sonatine’s technical challenges are so formidable that when Piccinini and Haefliger performed it together for the first time at Juilliard, where they met as students in the 1980s, no one at the vaunted conservatory had played it before. The young couple learned it themselves, with just as many battle scars as you’d expect.

“We had fights so huge that we would barely speak to each other. It was a great trial by fire, really,” Piccinini says, laughing at the memory.

Thankfully, their rehearsals these days are more sedate.

“We’ve come back to being extremely professional in rehearsal. We’re very concise and respectful. I would not treat Marina in a different way than my other chamber music partners,” Haefliger says.

Then again, Piccinini and Haefliger are different people now. Once their daughter was old enough, they started studying Shaolin kung fu as a family. Piccinini and Haefliger credit the practice with helping them build their endurance, keep a cool head and feel present in their bodies — all essential skills for professional musicians.

“You take your ego out of your work,” Haefliger said. “Things don’t come close to you, because they actually have no way of doing that — they can only come close to your art form. It’s brought a lot of clarity into our lives.”

According to Shaolin tradition, Piccinini has earned the honorific shifu (“teacher”), a level of commitment that technically permits her to take on her own students. That’s “absolutely not in the cards,” she says — she’d rather stick to flute, with students who are now touring artists themselves. (Some of them will join Piccinini for her Aug. 11 National Flute Association performance of Aaron Jay Kernis’s “Siren,” for soloist and eight more flutes.) Between performances, she’ll lead a masterclass at Grant Park on Aug. 9, too, as part of her and Haefliger’s residency.

And yes, sometimes she even teaches students a thing or two she learned in the temple.

“We’ll do some exercises, moves, stances, kicks, stretches to help upper-body mobility or breathing,” Piccinini chuckles. “You know, non-difficult stuff.”

Marina Piccinini and Andreas Haefliger play the following public concerts:

Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.

The Rubin Institute for Music Criticism helps fund our classical music coverage. The Chicago Tribune maintains complete editorial control over assignments and content.