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.

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 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.

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.

Mozart's The Magic Flute can be counted on for whimsy of the highest order, but not necessarily for magic. And when you notice during a performance that this is an opera whose main characters undergo tedious fire-and-water rituals just to get married, the piece as a whole isn't always working. Opera Philadelphia's current production, which opened Friday at the Academy of Music, was reasonably resourceful even if the singers were a bit green, in what amounted to a middling encounter with the least stageable of Mozart's major operas.

Presented by Opera Philadelphia. Conducted by Corrado Rovaris. Production by Diane Paulus, stage directed by Ashlie Corcorant. Cast: Antonio Lozano . . . Tamino Elizabeth Zharoff . . . Pamina Mark Stone . . . Papageno Jordan Bisch . . . Sarastro Ben Wager . . . Speaker Rachele Gilmore . . . Queen of the Night Wednesday, Friday and Sunday at the Academy of Music. www.operaphila.org or 215-893-1018.

Whenever an excellent new flutist arrives in the classical concert world, you wish him or her a cushy position in a major symphony orchestra with time for a part-time solo career. Even the best unaffiliated flutists have it tough: Witness the ceaseless enterprise of Mimi Stillman and her Dolce Suono Ensemble. Yet when the Taiwanese-born, Belgian-trained Angel Hsiao was presented by Astral Artists in a solo recital Sunday at the Trinity Center, a full-time solo career seemed warranted.

For all of Mozart's distilled, sublime music, The Magic Flute usually feels like a work in progress due to its haphazard dramaturgy, obscure Masonic symbolism, and strangely paced second act. So, one can't argue on principle with the interventionist production that the Curtis Opera Theatre presented Thursday at the Prince Music Theater, even if solved problems came with new blind alleys. The parablelike story usually begins with the opera's hero, Tamino, being pursued by a dragon.

Even the most devoted classical musicians don't necessarily play their instruments every single day. So it's hard to guess what flutist Mimi Stillman stands to accomplish by recording, on video, Debussy's elusively melodic flute solo Syrinx every day (or close to it) for a year and posting the results on her website. "A year is a long time, it's true. I don't know where it will take me - or what I will find in the music. But I know I'll find something," said the founder and artistic director of the Philadelphia-based Dolce Suono Ensemble, who has already posted Syrinx videos for Israel and Italy on www.mimistillman.org . "Sometimes you have an audience that's unexpected," she said.

Pop Maroon 5 Overexposed (A&M/Octone ) It's hard to stay on top with music styles mutating so fast. Maroon 5 has apparently accomplished this via some sort of Faustian pact, trading in the soul that made its 2007 CD It Won't Be Soon Before Long such a joy for the machine-tooled dance-pop of last year's comeback single, "Moves Like Jagger. " Overexposed has a couple of similar electro-rousers, "One More Night" and "Payphone," that are catchier than a computer virus.

During the course of its regular concert season, Dolce Suono Ensemble jumps off the high dive often enough that when these intrepid musicians take it easy, you're a little relieved for their sake — while resting assured that your own ears won't fall off from overuse. So it was in the Sunday concert at Trinity Center with particularly songful pieces by Mozart and Schubert, three of the pieces arranged for flute, cello, and piano accompaniment by no less than composer Steven Stucky.

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.