Pandora's Box

If you are given Pandora’s Box, would you open it?

Katie Kim, Flute, and Kenji Fujimura, Piano, transform it into a musical box weaving stories of the most popular yet monumental flute and piano works from the Romantic and modern eras. It contains Romantic themes of the intriguing stories of human life, the dramas of love, betrayal, the good and evil, and even death. 

Theobald Boehm’s innovations on the modern flute in 1828 is the opening of Pandora’s Box for flute literature during the nineteenth century. Composers began exploring the potential of the flute by assigning them with the role, that of a Primadonna of an opera.

The opening piece, Airs de Ballet D’Ascanio by Saint-Saëns, is from his 1890 grand French opera, Ascanio, depicting the entanglements of love. 

Undine is a fairytale by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. Undine, a water spirit, marries a knight who betrays her, leading to her tragic return to the water and his death. In this sonata, Reinecke brilliantly narrates Undine’s story; a world of water, human life, love, betrayal and ultimate sorrow transformed into exquisite musical melodies. 

Carmen tells the tragic story of a fiery, free-spirited gypsy woman and her obsessive love affair with Don José, a native soldier from Spain. 

In the middle of the program, includes Olivier Messiaen’s Le Merle Noir (“Black Bird”), in which the composer uses modern techniques to imitate the call and fluttering of the blackbird.

“Pandora’s Box” also features La Vita Nuova (“The New Life”), by Andrián Pertout, a Chilean-Australian composer based in Melbourne. Pertout explores American theorist Tom Johnson’s ideas on harmony (Other Harmony: beyond Tonal and Atonal; 2014) in this minimalistic, yet harmonically complex work. He reveals the alto flute’s mellow, velvety and ethereal sound against the backdrop of piano’s raindrop-like sound.

The concert concludes with Der Freischütz by Weber which is considered one of the first German masterpieces in the opera world. The opera tells a dark tale of a young forester who tries to win his girlfriend’s hand in marriage. He must win a shooting contest to do so, and finds himself making a deal with the devil.