Flute

The handmade $5,000 silver flute had been stolen from the overseas mail, and music teacher Catherine Duerr believed the odds against seeing it again were "phenomenal. " Then she visited a Delaware County music store, and there it was, the same silver Sankyo Prima flute with the unusual G/A trill key, the one she had ordered from a store on a trip to West Germany. A federal grand jury in Philadelphia yesterday accused U.S. Customs Service inspector Michael Tornello of stealing the flute, worth $4,904.

If 1807 & Friends looks a lot like the Wister String Quartet, it is simply a comment on the determination of violinist Nancy Bean to plant chamber music in as many places as possible. It was under the rubric 1807 & Friends that the quartet played at the University of the Arts' Laurie Wagman Hall on Monday, offering conventional fare and sharing the stage with flutist-composer Leslie Burrs. Burrs played different bamboo flutes, one in a solo improvisation and one in a work with quartet, Before Sundawn.

The solo flute can sound two-dimensional and its player remote from listeners. Gary Shocker, however, has determined to make the flute vivid and himself a stage presence. The 30-year-old Easton native played with pianist Dennis Helmrich yesterday at the Haverford School in the Tri-County Concerts emerging artists series. By programming music by Martinu, Casella, Leclair, Debussy and Bach - and himself - he freed his recital from the routine. By playing a sonic range that touched a near-whisper and sometimes a steam- engine shriek, he declared the flute's ability to express something more than agility and prettiness.

Philomel Baroque and Julianne Baird - the names alone are evocative. The period-instrument ensemble and the agile-voiced soprano have performed together a dozen or so times in the last 20 years, and are paired again this weekend in a series of concerts in Wayne, Doylestown and Center City. Audiences know to expect a dynamic combination of their light and bright sounds. And the pre-Christmas program promises to be evocative, too. Baird will be soloist in sacred arias by Bach, a secular aria by Handel, and a Vivaldi motet that lies somewhere in between, with a text contrasting worldly delights (bad, even if they don't sound it)

Jamie Baum switched from piano to the flute for the most logical of reasons: "You just can't carry a piano around with you. I wanted an instrument I could, well, take to the beach with me. " There's probably a bit more behind the transition, but that's as good a reason as any. In any case, the native of Fairfield, Conn., who has been based in New York for the last 10 years, has been carrying her flute around in the best of company and making a name for herself as an innovative virtuoso on an instrument that is not among the most common in jazz circles these days.

A former U.S. Customs inspector who stole a $4,900 silver flute from the overseas mail in Philadelphia and sold it to a music store for $144 was sentenced yesterday to donate 200 hours to community service. The former inspector, Michael Tornello, 40, of Drexel Hill, Delaware County, also was fined $2,500 and placed on probation for five years by U.S. District Judge James McGirr Kelly. His defense attorney, Michael A. DeFino, acknowledged that Tornello had made a series of "stupid mistakes" that cost him his $30,000-a-year job and his reputation.

Flutist Eugenia Zukerman and harpist Yolanda Kondonassis could be most easily appreciated Thursday night at Bryn Mawr College when playing solo, not as a duo. The acoustics of the Great Hall in Thomas Library presented a strange set of circumstances that kept them from being heard as a cohesive ensemble - a problem probably as frustrating to them as it was to the audience. Great Hall is aptly named. The amount of space it gives sound to travel is vast, and bare stone walls create acoustical challenges different for each instrument.

The flute doesn't get much respect in jazz circles. It's a novelty for saxophonists, a toy to toot when they're bored with their alto or tenor. And rare is the jazz composition written with the flute in mind. So Dave Valentin's success is extraordinary. He's taken the Rodney Dangerfield of instruments, churned out 17 albums since 1979, been named top flutist six years straight by Jazziz magazine readers (although he ranked sixth in the most recent Downbeat magazine poll, whose readers tend to have more conservative tastes)

Flutist Carol Wincenc and harpist Nancy Allen emphasized the theatrical and the dramatic at Haverford College last night in a concert that let them show off their strengths as soloists and as a pair of musically sensitive colleagues. Virtuoso solos - Faure's Impromptu (Op. 86) for harp; Debussy's Syrinx for flute - were scattered among duets such as Bartok's Rumanian Folk Dances. Yet at the heart of the informal and feisty program was a musical and meditative piece - George Rochberg's Slow Fires of Autumn, written in memory of his son and inspired by a trip to Japan.

In a late Stone Age village on the floodplain of China's Yellow River Valley, someone carved a tiny flute from the wing bone of a crane. Little did that ancient artisan know that music from the flute would reach across nine millennia. "It's a sweet sound, like a little recorder," said archaeological chemist Garman Harbottle, who used carbon dating to establish the age of this flute, by far the oldest playable musical instrument ever found. The discovery not only vastly extends the history of music, but it also adds to an emerging picture of a fascinating early people - among the first to move from caves to villages.

In Astral Artists' one-day Spiritual Voyages Festival on Saturday, flutist Julietta Curenton rightly occupied the "eye of the storm" slot - the middle - having been the conceptual epicenter of the three-concert event at Church of the Holy Trinity with a program that solidly bridged mainstream classical repertoire and the non-European cultures represented in the other two concerts. She and pianist Andrea Lam followed an African American program featuring composers George Walker and Alvin Singleton and preceded music of Asian and Latin American origin with composers such as Gabriela Lena Frank and musicians such as Swarthmore's Gamelan Semara Santi.

So ingratiating, stylish and historically iconic is the flute that it's hard to imagine why the instrument claims the spotlight so infrequently: Joshua Smith's flute concert Tuesday is a once-every-two-seasons occasion for the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. Educated at the Curtis Institute and ensconced in the Cleveland Orchestra's principal flute position for 21 years (he was hired at age 20), Smith now appears to be pursuing a solo career: He's recording Bach for the Delos label and is looking more like a movie star than a classical musician in his latest publicity photos.

NEW YORK - How often do you want an opera to be at least a half-hour longer? So it is with the radically reimagined, 90-minute version of Mozart's The Magic Flute, playing through July 17 at the Lincoln Center Festival. The reimagining was done by Peter Brook, the British-born, Paris-based director who made theater history with epics such as The Mahabharata but has more deeply infiltrated theatrical consciousness with his slimmed-down versions of Carmen and Pelleas et Melisande - both of which are periodically mounted in Philadelphia by Curtis Opera Theatre.

Antonio Vivaldi should be every composer's secret friend: He's a brand name, a feel-good presence on programs for mainstream audiences who ends up making everybody else's music look substantial in comparison. So it was on Friday when the Flute Concerto in D minor (RV 431a) was given its U.S. premiere by the Philadelphia Orchestra and its principal flutist Jeffrey Khaner (on the composer's 333d birthday) after being discovered a year ago in Edinburgh, Scotland. Though Vivaldi wrote good concertos and even better operas, this item is quite modest, written according to the usual formulas with a flattering understanding of the flute and a nice middle-movement tune that soon hits a hiccup that tells the ear that the composer is wrapping it up, his instinct for not wearing out his welcome outweighing any sense of proportion.

Sex and the City 2 A flute of champagne on a runaway train - bubbly, giddy-making, and all over the place. Overlong and overdressed, but its target audience will find its "girls just want to have friends" message hard to resist. R Iron Man 2 At least two too many villains hounding Our Hero, but Robert Downey Jr. carries the day with his self-mocking color commentary on Tony "Iron Man" Stark's action, in and out of the superhero suit. With Gwyneth Paltrow, Scarlett Johansson, and Mickey Rourke.

Few instrumental combinations suggest so many alternative possibilities as the flute/viola/harp lineup that Debussy used in the series of sonatas that might have revolutionized chamber music had brain cancer not stopped him from finishing the cycle. As it is, his ever-intriguing Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp - in which the standard piano trio morphs into more delicate sounds with harp replacing piano, viola instead of cello, and flute standing in for violin - was the starting point of Dolce Suono Ensemble's final concert of its fifth season.

Beyond her invitingly garrulous stage presence, Korean flutist Jasmine Choi is a revisionist, and one so serious as to put her young career on the line for the sake of broadening the flute repertoire and raising the instrument's profile. Having transcribed the Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky violin concertos for flute, Choi made Franck's Violin Sonata the centerpiece of her Sunday recital at the Trinity Center (produced by Astral Artists) and also included more modern works by Isang Yun and Paul Schoenfield.

The monstrous economy may be devouring more expensive luxuries and the businesses that purvey them, but it can't get its teeth around one reinvented American comfort food: the cupcake. A sweet love affair that began before the recession is going strong during it, as more of these niche bakeries rise and prosper in the Philadelphia area. Indeed, just two weeks ago, the city's newest cupcake business literally rolled into town: the confetti- covered Buttercream Cupcake Truck, which announces its stops on Twitter and has been drawing long lines around Center City.

Twenty-five years ago, as she imagined her life in middle age, Tira Mitchell might have envisioned herself playing the flute for a major orchestra. She had adopted the flute at 8, and by the time she graduated from high school in Upstate New York, she had studied at the Tanglewood Institute, and taken private lessons and master classes with top flutists at the Boston Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic. She excelled sufficiently to be chosen to perform with the Empire State Youth Orchestra.