True virtuoso soloists are few and far between. With a god-like quality, these artists command their instruments so powerfully that it becomes difficult for the audience to decipher the difference between instrument and instrumentalist. It’s a phenomenon as mesmerizing as it is enigmatic. 

Jasmine Choi is of those rarest of artists who seems conjured out of thin air for the sole purpose of playing the flute. Which is, no doubt, why the Sarasota Music Festival featured her in its closing concert at the Sarasota Opera House June 13. 

In a silver-gold dress that solidified the illusion of her being one with her flute, Choi performed Mozart’s Flute Concerto in D Major alongside the festival orchestra. We never  had to wonder where we were going, for Choi led everyone – audience and ensemble alike – through a web of expression. 

I’ve had the good fortune of seeing Choi perform three times now. It is an experience that ages like fine wine. Each note speaks with her glorious and richly refined tone. Her low register is especially indulgent, sitting in your chest like a mug of hot chocolate on a crisp winter day.  

While her Mozart cadenzas highlighted the quality of her musicianship rather than her technical skills, Choi blew the audience straight to the doorstep of next year’s festival (to which I hope she will return to resume her role as a member of the festival faculty) with her encore of Voliere,  a brilliant excerpt from Saint-Saëns’ “Carnival of the Animals.” As a special treat, she’d received permission to alter the score to match the orchestration of the Mozart Concerto. At a breathtaking speed, Choi leapt through the octaves so delicately that it wasn’t until she lifted the flute from her lips and held it out in front of her that the audience realized she had finished. 

Choi wasn’t the only artist who surprised. The festival orchestra, composed of fellows and faculty together, also performed Schubert’s Concerto in C Major and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A Major. In the two weeks they’ve played together, they have managed to form an ensemble so sophisticated and balanced that I was able to hear each voice at the moment it mattered. These musicians know when to step into the spotlight and when to step back and raise the voices around them. 

Not only are they a balanced ensemble, they are a consistent one. Schubert and Beethoven share a repetitive quality in which they tend to comment on a repeated melody that appears multiple times in identical copies of its original incarnation. With the festival musicians, this was obvious. In fact, they did it so well that each copy appeared with graceful ease as if someone had simply pressed “play” on a CD player. 

The Sarasota Music Festival prides itself on highlighting the next generation of musical talent. If this is where the future of classical music is headed, we are in good hands indeed.