Jasmine Choi flute recital

I've often wondered why modern composers don't create suites of modern dances in the same way Baroque composers fashioned suites out of the dances of their own era. Jasmine Choi's Astral Artists recital included a contemporary piece that proved at least one composer has received the same brilliant inspiration.

Paul Schoenfield's Four Souvenirs gives four 20th-Century dances the same kind of treatment that Bach and other Baroque composers imposed on their dances. The dances are all extended and elaborated, but they retain their basic characteristics.

Schoenfield's closing "Square Dance" races along faster than any real dancers could actually move, but we have a vision of the square dance in our head that we can relate to in a way that we can't relate to a gavotte or a minuet.

His opening Samba received the same kind of acceleration; the Tango belonged to the dreamier segment of its genre; and the section marked "Tin Pan Alley" was so gently sentimental that it evoked a flutter of spontaneous applause.

Expanding her repertoire

Jasmine Choi is a 27-year-old flutist who is combining a career as associate principal flute of the Cincinnati Orchestra with solo appearances with orchestras in Europe, the U.S. and her native Korea. She is dedicated to expanding the flute repertoire, and the highlight of her recital was a particularly spectacular example of her efforts: a transcription for flute and piano of Cesar Franck's Sonata for Violin and Piano in A Minor.

The transcription worked so well that I never had any sense that the flute part had been written for another, very different instrument. At a few places in the first movement the piano came on too strong when it played solo, but Choi's flute sounded right in its element when it weathered the storm the piano creates in Franck's second movement.

In the rest of the piece you could hear the long floating lines, flutter-tongued chatter, and rolling melodies that I associate with flute music. I even heard one genuine climactic shriek.

This Sonata's great attraction is the fact that the Franck original is a highly Romantic piece in the best traditions of the Romantic period. The Romantics seem to have neglected the flute. Most of the flute solos we hear stem from the Baroque and Classical periods that preceded the Romantic era and from the movements (like the French impressionists) that followed it.

Choi's transcription gives the flute the opportunity to indulge in the surging passions and grand gestures the Romantics added to our musical dialogue. It must be a real workout for an instrumentalist who works with her lungs and lip muscles but it was worth all the effort she put into it.

Korean, or German?

The intermission gave Choi a chance to recover before she tackled a major piece that displayed another aspect of her interests: the interaction between Asian and Western music.

Isang Yun is a Korean composer who spent much of his life in Germany because of the political situation in Korea after the Korean War. He's one of the Asian composers who pioneered the fusion of Western and Asian musical traditions. His Garak for flute and piano is probably his best known and most performed work.

According to Daniel Webster's program notes, Choi has said that the audiences' judgment that Garak sounds "more Korean" or "more German" seems to depend on who's playing it. To my ear, it sounds like a series of calls or musical gestures in an idiom that resembles the flute music you sometimes hear in the sound tracks of Asian movies. It traces an arc that rises to an intense peak and recedes to a surprisingly moving ending in the flute's low range.

Memorable event

Choi opened with a Bach sonata and closed with a Fantasie on Themes from Der Freischutz by the late 19th Century French flutist, Paul Taffanel. The first two movements of the Bach sounded dry, but Choi's work with the long andante made up for that.

The Taffanel reduces a major opera to a piece for flute and piano and still manages to deliver a dramatic introduction, solemn arias and a satisfactory round of dances and serenades. Choi would be worth listening to if she confined herself to the stodgiest quarters of the flute repertoire. But her efforts to expand her domain produced one of Astral's most memorable events.