Kyle Kellams: This weekend is also the second Arkansas Flute Festival, taking place on the University of Arkansas campus. The festival begins Saturday morning, Jan. 31 at 9 a.m. and will include flute exhibitors, recitals, a piccolo course, performances, a flute choir.
Headlining this year’s festival is Jasmine Choi. Choi is hailed by The Philadelphia Inquirer as a revisionist. Korea Times calls her the goddess of the flute. This is Choi’s performance of Brahms Sonata 122 on the Sony Classical label.
(An excerpt of Jasmine Choi performing Brahms Sonata 122 plays.)
Choi is at home performing Brahms, Mozart and Paganini, but she also stretches her performances to jazz and more. Yesterday we reached her in Austria, with us for the conversation, Cristina Ballatori, assistant professor of flute at the U of A. We wanted to learn more about the Arkansas Flute Festival and about Jasmine Choi’s Monday night concert in the Faulkner Performing Arts Center.
Cristina Ballatori says she sought suggestions for this year’s festival from students.
Cristina Ballatori: Who do you want? And they all are like, ‘Jasmine Choi’. So I said, OK. So I reached out and just asked if Jasmine would come, and we were delighted that she could join us. So, she is a fan favorite. She’s a fabulous flutist and musician. And my students were I mean, it was hands down Jasmine Choi. So.
Jasmine Choi: Great to hear that.
Kellams: Jasmine Choi, welcome to Ozarks at Large. I get the idea from looking at your presence online that you love performing and you love working with young musicians.
Choi: I have to say, I just love flute and everything requiring flute. I love doing it, performing, working with students, talking about the flute. And I like explaining about the flute. And also I love all kinds of genres. Not that I’m good at it, but I also love working with jazz musicians and Korean pop musicians and Korean traditional musicians. And for me, it’s all under the big umbrella called flute. So that’s my passion and my life. And I’m really, really excited to come to Arkansas for the very first time in my life and to meet all these enthusiastic fans and students and flutists like Cristina.
Kellams: You mentioned you like all genres. It might be Mozart on a recording, it might be Claude Bolling. But you love to explore.
Choi: Right. Yeah, seems like it. I’m very open minded to the things that I don’t know because the learning process, which also makes me back to become a beginner. This is a very exciting feeling. Like all of us flutists or all the other instrumentalists, when we first start our instrument for the first time, that kind of excitement and enthusiasm. And when you play the flute or the same instrument for many years, you kind of lose this.
And when I try new pieces or new genres and meet new people, it drives me to the beginner attitude and the feeling of, oh my God, I don’t know anything and I’m willing to learn. So I tend to accept a lot of challenges. And one of them was recently I had to play conduct an orchestra playing the Mozart Flute Concerto D major and the Sarasate Zigeunerweisen unconducted with the chamber orchestra. So without a conductor. So I was leading the orchestra, so to speak. And that was a really big challenge for me.
And also the other one was that I was supposed to play a concert at Lincoln Center for their gala concert, and something fell through in the last minute with the new commissioned piece. And that was about ten weeks before the concert, and it was absolutely too late to get a hold of any decent composers. So I ended up writing my own composition. I freaked out so much, but then in the end, I was kind of glad that I went through it and it was a new challenge and experience for me.
Kellams: Cristina, I’m going to guess that Jasmine’s open arms to challenges and open mindedness to music is part of the reason you heard so much from the students that they wanted her to be in Fayetteville.
Ballatori: Yes, Jasmine is a consummate musician and flutist, and she’s a warm and welcoming presence. And most of our students, this is how they hear music now. They hear it on YouTube, they hear it on social media, and they go to live concerts. But their first exposure to great musicians now is on the internet, and they have all grown up watching Jasmine’s videos and performances on YouTube and social media.
So they are absolutely over the moon about having her with us. Hearing her play live and in person. Because there’s nothing like live music, especially when someone is a brilliant musician and they’re very excited. So yes, all the above.
Kellams: And Jasmine, one thing I appreciate about your presence online is that you don’t just talk to fellow musicians, you’re talking to people like me who don’t play music. I’m thinking of one instance where you had your personal flute, and then you had a flute that you had purchased from Amazon for $69. And you had a bar across so you couldn’t tell which flute. And you said, which one do you think is mine, which costs more than $69, and which one do you think is the one you saw me open, unbox and put together?
And I loved your approach to that and your playfulness, and that seems to be part of your approach to music and perhaps life.
Choi: Well, first of all, thank you so much for watching this video, means a lot to me. And for me it was also a curiosity as well. When I was approached to do this kind of an experiment, that I was personally curious about, this idea that they take my first reaction, how it is like to open up a cheapest flute you can find online and try to play. And because we also don’t get this kind of an opportunity, experience as a professional flutist, and I have to say two things. That one thing was that when I started my full-time solo career, it connected me to, so to speak, a real world.
So I felt like I came out of the music bubble, the classical musician bubble or professional flutist bubble. And from that moment, I tried to connect with people who normally don’t go to the classical music concert or who never saw flute in life. So I started just going to my neighbor’s place for their birthday party and started playing the birthday tune on the flute. And most of them have never seen the flute. And they were so curious about, how do you make sound or how many keys do you have, and how can you play other tunes as well? So these kind of questions I’ve never gotten, for example, when I was in a music school and I grew up with music, musical family, a lot of musicians in the family, and also when I was working as an orchestral musician. They all grew up with so much music around.
And then later on, when I was approached by so many people who are not from the music bubble, it made me think differently and gave me a different perspective of music. And also what’s the purpose? What’s the service I can provide to the community, to the people who don’t know about music? So I felt like we as a musician have to have this purpose as a musician, not only playing in the same bubble. And I wanted to learn how I can be the good ambassador of the flute and also the music.
So this kind of a change of a thought, I think, made me be a different kind of a musician as well. And then during all this whole wave of changing my thoughts as a musician and as a purpose as a musician, the COVID hit. And then I started all of a sudden connecting with so many people from all over the world, not only my music, but also my explanation, and teaching little kids and giving them opportunities to play with me.
Not only flutists, but also pianists to collaborate with me online. And so it was only becoming bigger and bigger and at that point, it wouldn’t matter for me anymore if I explained well or if I play well, it was more about how I can give, how I can share what I have, what I can do as a musician. In the end, really, it doesn’t matter how many right notes or wrong notes I play, but it’s more like how many lives I make a good impact to, and how many people who will get happy or get touched through the music I play.
Kellams: Jasmine Choi will headline this year’s Arkansas Flute Festival beginning Saturday morning, Jan. 31 at the University of Arkansas. Choi will perform as the first featured artist in the Music Monday series at the Faulkner Performing Arts Center Monday night at 7:30 p.m.
Cristina Ballatori is an assistant professor of flute at the University of Arkansas. A complete schedule for the festival can be found if you go to the Facebook page for Arkansas Flute Festival. Jasmine Choi spoke with us from Austria by Zoom yesterday.
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