Fabulous Founding Flutist, Fenwick

By Marcus Thompson

Despite all the f’s with which he and his life come to mind, BCMS founding flutist Fenwick Smith (1949–July 19, 2017) was probably the quietest person I have ever met. He was a gentle soft-spoken man of few well-chosen words. Had he never played a note in our series he would still be recalled and revered as one of the most visible and prolific artists on the Boston scene for decades.

That he was a noted recording artist and a former member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Flute Faculty of New England Conservatory, and Boston Musica Viva will be properly noted and appreciated in the days ahead. He still holds the record for annual faculty recitals played at Jordan Hall over more than three decades.

What might be less known is his generosity to friends, colleagues and students; his mastery of handwork—from building his own house to making his own flutes—and the ease and quiet humility with which he shared brilliant insights into music with BCMS colleagues and high school students at Boston Arts Academy alike. He was also an entrepreneur: in the mid-1990s he acquired a commercial building that housed an old Masonic temple on its top floor, then spent years in renovation to turn that space into a sumptuous, state-of-the-art recording/rehearsal studio in a city where these are still in short supply.

Up close he was known to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the flute repertoire. In my earliest contact with him, when he still wore his salt and pepper hair in a long braid, we performed and recorded George Edwards’ quintet Kreuz und Quer with Boston Music Viva almost a decade before BCMS. Between 1983 and his retirement from our concert stage in 2011, Fenwick performed with BCMS works by Bach, Telemann, Mozart, Schoenberg, Rorem, Crumb, Jolivet, Duruflé, Debussy, Copland, Diamond, McKinley, Roussel, and Villa-Lobos, among others. He was ‘at home’ in everything he played from very early to recent. He seemed to know and have played everything!

On one occasion I stumbled upon a beautiful and obscure work for flute, viola, and piano that I was hearing in a taxi on a public radio station while on a concert trip to Pittsburgh. My immediate instinct was to ‘alert’ and ‘inform’ Fenwick of my discovery until I learned that the performance was his recording, and that I was playing with him! He also introduced me to duos of Joseph Martin Kraus and François Devienne that we played soon after on WGBH while representing BCMS. We are all grateful for wisdom, beauty, and grace Fenwick brought to all our contacts.

Pictured below is one of my fondest memories with him: a BCMS Winter Festival performance at MIT with pianist Randy Hodgkinson, of Andrew Imbrie’s Serenade for Flute, Viola, and Piano.