You might have seen the ad for this weekend’s shows at the Long Center. The Austin Symphony is hosting the world’s most renowned flautist, James Galway, and his wife Lady Jeanne Galway, who is a well-known classical flautist as well. James is a Knight of the British Empire, thus, Jeanne is his Lady. Now it’s not my regular beat, but this caught my eye because Jeanne and I attended high school together on Long Island, N.Y. in the early part of the 1970s. We hung with the same crowd, went to the same parties, but mostly I remember her as the flute queen, so it’s no surprise she ended up where she did.
“It might have been a stroke of luck or fate to marry my husband,” she says on the phone from California. “But I was always with my flute. It’s really a testament to my passion for the flute and how I worked very, very hard.”
Of all the people I knew back then, she’s certainly the most successful. “At 18, it’s rare to have a passion like that. How can you know what your talents are and where you can possibly go? Sometimes you find it later in life. I was lucky enough to far exceed my goals.”
Lady Jeanne (I knew her by her maiden name, Cinnante) also has her own group, Zephyr, which will be appearing in San Antonio on March 3. “It’s a flute trio out of New York with cello and piano. It’s nice that I get to do things on my own, but it’s also nice that I get to do things with my husband. We’ve been playing together on stage for 12 or 13 years, but sometimes the repertoire doesn’t call for two flutes.”
They now reside in Switzerland where they hold an annual summer flute class. Jeanne feels she brings something down to earth to the proceedings. “I try to teach and I try to encourage them. Coming from a working class background, I can say to them honestly that I know what it’s like, but you can work through it.”
This article appears in February 27 • 2009.