UC DAVIS FLUTE FESTIVAL

Following in the footsteps of the Department of Music’s Violafest! (2003), Cello Festival (2007) and Percussion Festival (2008), this season’s Flute Festival brings together top professional and student musicians from the regional flute community in a celebration of the instrument’s tradition, variety and potential.

The Jan. 23-24 festival is under the direction of UC Davis instructor-performer Tod Brody, principal flutist with myriad Northern California new-music groups, including UC Davis’ Empyrean Ensemble.

A preview event on Jan. 22 will feature Brody in a free Noon Concert in 115 Music Building.

Helen Spielman, a musician, flute teacher and performance coach, opens the festival at 10 a.m. Jan. 23 with a performance-anxiety workshop in the Mondavi Center’s Studio Theatre. The workshop’s subtitle is “Talking to Yourself Means You’re Sane and Confident.”

Spielman is scheduled to present a second performance-anxiety workshop, this one subtitled “Hallucinating Means You’re in Control of Your Performances,” at 10 a.m. Jan. 24, also in the Studio Theatre.

The workshops are open to all performers, not just flutists.

Here is the rest of the festival schedule, with all events taking place in the Studio Theatre:

JAN. 23

2:30 p.m.—Master class: Julie McKenzie, Julie McKenzie, principal flutist, San Francisco Opera Orchestra. People interested in performing during this class should contact Brody, tbrody.ucdavis.edu.

7 p.m.—Recital: McKenzie with Joan Nagano, piano.

JAN. 24

2:30 p.m.—Lecture-demonstration: Robert Dick, flutist, composer, teacher and author, on contemporary flute technique.

7 p.m.—Concert: Dick.

PASSES AND TICKETS: Festival passes for all events except the evening recital and concert are $30, available through the Department of Music, (530) 752-7896.

Single-event tickets are $10 at the door. Tickets for the recital and concert are available through the Mondavi Center box office: (530) 754-2787 or (866) 754-2787, or www.mondaviarts.org.

FESTIVAL WEB SITE: music.ucdavis.edu/flutefestival

TREE TALK

They call themselves Tree Talk, these two bassoonists, taking their name from the fact that their bassoons and other woodwind instruments are made of wood, and they are used to communicate. The musicians are David Granger and Alice Benjamin.

On Jan. 15, you can hear them in a free Noon Concert with five guest musicians: Tod Brody, flute, Ann Lavin, clarinet, and Laura Reynolds, oboe, all of whom, like Granger, are on the UC Davis music faculty; plus Ward Spangler, percussion, and Ellen Wasserman, piano.

The Tree Talk program includes Paul Chihara’s Branches, plus works by Eugène Bozza, Alan Hovhaness, Georges Bizet, Ignacio Cervantes and Bohuslav Martinu.

The Martinu pieces include a sextet that Granger described as wonderful but rarely performed, in a style that he calls French jazz, similar to music written in the 1920s by Milhaud and Ravel, who were intrigued by American jazz and composers such as Gershwin.

The program also features a Hovhaness duet on contra-bassoon. This instrument sounds only one octave lower than the bassoon, “but has to be twice as big in order to do this,” Granger said. “It is quite a handful to play, but the resultant sound is quite amazing, one that you ‘feel’ as well as hear.”

The concert is scheduled to start at 12:05 p.m. in 115 Music Building.