Why not the flute?
Must the soloists at orchestral concerts always be pianists, violinists or your occasional cellist? Isn’t there room for a wider variety of voices? And isn’t there something disarmingly intimate and unfiltered about an instrument that takes human breath and makes music of it without the assistance of a reed or brass mouthpiece?
I thought this while sitting in the sanctuary of Apple Valley’s Shepherd of the Valley Lutheran Church Thursday evening. I was enjoying a wonderfully diverse St. Paul Chamber Orchestra program that featured as star soloist Jasmine Choi, a Korean flutist who’s among a relative handful of itinerant virtuosi on her instrument who travel around the world performing recitals and joining orchestras for flute concertos.
Choi demonstrated to an enthusiastic audience that she deserves the mantle of stardom being conferred upon her by many in the industry. She took one of Mozart’s three flute concertos and made it feel like a triptych of operatic arias, the mood moving from playful to grief-filled to dancing with delight. When Choi concluded the evening with her own arrangement of a 19th-century violin showpiece by Pablo de Sarasate, her charisma went into overdrive, wringing every drop of schmaltz, drama and showmanship from a piece designed to dazzle.
Add a first half spent expertly channeling the anxious complexity of Sergei Prokofiev and you have a concert that could be called an excellent distillation of what the SPCO does so well — were it not for this versatile orchestra’s ability to do brilliant things with a much broader spectrum of music than that.
This deeply rewarding concert opened in quiet rumination and grew gradually more flamboyant and demonstrative. Launching the evening was a pair of the orchestra’s violinists — Eunice Kim and Kyu-Young Kim — bringing stunning intensity to Prokofiev’s Sonata for Two Violins. Spinning an engrossing musical dialogue, the two took listeners on a journey from dark drama to sad beauty to a hypnotic maelstrom of interweaving lines.
But the evening’s most memorable Prokofiev came when the orchestra premiered a new orchestration by Stephen Prutsman of the composer’s Piano Sonata No. 7. Prutsman took a work that can sound like dauntingly difficult terrain when played on piano and demystified it by delegating multiple instruments to lend their own sonic spin to Prokofiev’s emotional tumult. It proved a feat of imagination on Prutsman’s part, sometimes surging with symphonic fullness, other times bearing the conversational tone of chamber music.
But the concert’s main attraction was Choi, a star of her instrument who made Mozart’s Second Flute Concerto a joyous celebration that swept away any remaining dark clouds left behind by Prokofiev. Graceful and full of infectious energy, Choi lent each line a pure, powerful tone, even when flying through fast flurries of notes on one of her three showstopping cadenzas.
