FLUTIST FLURRY

posted by James Reel

Mathieu Dufour, who this season has been serving as principal flutist of both the Chicago Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic, will be giving a mostly French chamber-music recital here in Tucson this Sunday, courtesy of the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music (at the link, scroll down a bit for specifics). It's an interesting time for him to show up here. Dufour got a lot of publicity last week for giving up his L.A. job; an article in a Chicago newspaper reported that Dufour said that musicians in L.A. "have no tradition there -- no tradition of sound and no tradition of working together as a dedicated ensemble." But now he's claiming to the Los Angeles press that he was misquoted, a standard claim when somebody's loose talk gets him in trouble. You can find the latest in the affair here.