Late-summer light spilled through the doors of Kobe Bunka Hall on a September afternoon. Inside, the air felt charged with a quiet expectation as families, students and visitors from Europe and the United States settled into their seats. Four years after an online-only edition born of the pandemic, the 11th Kobe International Flute Competition returned to a living stage, and in doing so it also brought the curtain down on the competition’s 40th-anniversary year. The hall answered with a kind of collective breath, as if the building itself were leaning forward to listen.
The numbers told a story that matched the mood in the room. 357 applicants from 41 countries had stepped forward, 39 travelling to Kobe for the live rounds. Only six would reach the Final. From its beginnings in 1985 as a single-instrument competition, Kobe’s project has carried a clear purpose, an ambition to nurture young flautists while allowing the cosmopolitan port city of Kobe to speak through music. The shape of the event remains unusual by design, and that distinctiveness has become part of its identity.
In 1987 the competition became Japan’s first member of the World Federation of International Music Competitions, and in 1989 it gave a young Emmanuel Pahud an early international platform. The measure of the event has been continuity, sometimes in the face of historic adversity. After the devastating 1995 earthquake hit Kobe, the stage lights came back on in 1997. A funding crisis in 2017 was met with practical resolve, and the pandemic years were folded into the institution’s memory without letting them define it. Every round remains open to the public and streamed, a choice that keeps the competition grounded in local texture while extending an invitation to a worldwide audience.
The week itself moved briskly yet with care. On 4th September the semi-final offered a compact tour of the French school with Gaubert’s Sonatine, Taffanel’s Fantasia on Weber, and Ibert’s Pièce. The sequence reminded listeners that line and clarity are very much present-tense values, alive with every breath and phrase. The next evening Bunka Hall filled for a jury gala. Major flautists Silvia Careddu, Andrea Oliva, and Hiroaki Kanda took the stage, and the event quietly underscored an ethos that felt woven through the week: the judges here are musicians first. Outside the hall, the city answered in kind with street sets, school visits, and civic concerts. The competition slipped into daily life so easily that the week felt less like a sealed event and more like a current running through the port of Kobe.
The architecture of the Final was simple, yet demanding. Each player led Mozart’s Concerto in D major K.314, from memory, then paired it with an unaccompanied work of their choice written after 1985. Order was left to the finalists. Some opened with the contemporary piece and then reset their ears for Mozart; others began with the concerto and stepped from the 18th century into modern solitude. The design asked for steadiness and candor, which in turn rewarded imagination. Nevertheless, the finalists were highly exposed: cues for a wind attack, or the length of a fermata, read as plainly as a missed note.
Fabian Johannes Egger framed Mozart less as display than as chamber music. “What was special about this performance – and it was the first time for me – was that there was no conductor. And I actually think that’s fantastic for Mozart! Above all, you had to listen much more carefully and precisely, which made it feel very much like a small chamber piece with a large ensemble,” he later wrote by email. He continued, “I don’t particularly believe in taking a dominant position in a work like this… It is very important for me not to feel like a soloist, but rather to have the honor of being a part of it.”
The results were audible: long, calm paragraphs that breathed without losing profile; articulation with bite but without chatter; a top octave that kept its velvet even at full weight. Egger also located his reading within a lineage: “I feel more connected to the lyrical approach of the French school. The way they play, that elegance, I think, fits very well with Mozart’s D major concerto.”
Riccardo Cellacchi offered a complementary profile: phrasing that arrived as thought made audible, ornaments that clarified ideas without italicizing them. In the modern work by Michael Jarrell he drew a narrative at the edge of the instrument – overblown harmonics, breath noise, the percussive snap of tongue and keys – paced to the room rather than to effect. His own account of how contemporary writing lands in performance was crisply put: “Contemporary music requires a lot of effort from the player… we really have to exaggerate everything (articulation, sound, accents) in order to make it very ‘theatrical,’ like an actor would do.” That sensibility – and the return to a live hall after the pandemic years – colored the week. “Recording a piece or performing it live are two completely different things,” he noted, adding that a competition is “also a place for building human relationships among the contestants.”
The remaining finalists mapped a clear range without noise or self-advertising. Brina Unuk turned Tilmann Dehnhardt into a study of breath as color. Whisper noise, micro-tuned whistle-tones, flutter-tonguing, and key pops became diction instead of novelty, and the palette gathered itself into argument. Tohko Fujino began Mozart tightly, and then a small sip of water between the first and second movements steadied her. From the second movement onward she played with a settled focus that read as confidence on the stage. In the modern work, by Kalevi Aho, she showed clean-lined clarity and quick, assured leaps across the flute’s full range, and the piece took on a musical map that made sense while still feeling freshly drawn.
Anna Komarova kept Mozart unforced, and Yan Maresz unfolded under her hands with a steady internal compass. Franziska Anne Fundelić, in Philippe Hurel, folded tongue pizzicato and other extended techniques into lines so clean that you heard the sentence first and only then the technique. In a Final that placed a premium on risk, such clarity of craft read as discipline.
What most mattered in the hall was not the novelty of the setup but imagination, partnership and line. Without a baton, cadences and tuttis still needed shaping by breath and body, yet the players who rose to the top treated those choices as musical conversation rather than display. Egger’s downbeats felt like agreements; Cellacchi’s rubato opened and closed like a well-oiled hinge, timing that left colleagues sure of where to land. Both kept the slow movement as line and the Rondo’s brightness unmannered. The difference between them read as temperament – Egger as a builder of paragraphs, Cellacchi more argumentative, rhetoric flowing as naturally as breath.
When the announcement arrived, it felt forthright. Jury chair Hideaki Sakai called the outcome “somewhat abnormal,” drawing a chuckle and then applause: a tie for first, no second, and a tie for third. First prize: Riccardo Cellacchi (Italy) and Fabian Johannes Egger (Germany). Third: Tohko Fujino (Japan) and Brina Unuk (Slovenia). Fourth: Anna Komarova (Russia). Fifth: Franziska Anne Fundelić (Croatia/Hungary). A special award recognized Calvin Mayman (United States).
Kobe’s audience gave the week its defining character. In the lobby after the Final, a local resident called the competition “a civic asset,” adding with everyday clarity that “the live stream now means entire families can gather to watch at home.” Outreach events across the city confirmed the point. At the Duo Kobe shopping arcade inside the station, an outreach concert drew commuters, families, and passers-by into the orbit of the event, and the city’s daily flow folded music into its own rhythm. The scene kept repeating across the week. Students sat through live rounds with pencils out. Retirees compared cadenzas over coffee. Tourists stumbled in and stayed.
Walking out of the hall in late-summer light, you felt a city that listens, and a stage that invites the close listening of chamber music into a concerto. In Kobe this year the flute turned breath into public value, and the value felt shared, all across the city.