Acclaim
“Her playing is colored by a joy and spontaneity that communicates to everyone around her, audience and fellow musicians”
– The Washington Post
“Superb playing. She belongs unambiguously in the highest echelon”
– Financial Times, London
“Music bursts from her as naturally as leaves from trees”
– The New York Times
“One meets remarkable human accomplishments every day, but Ms. Robison showed me things I hadn’t known the machine could do – the breadth of tone she summoned, the sweetness of the even, fleet, soft playing. She breathed and phrased and inflected and colored the music like a great singer; only the clarity of articulation suggested the instrumentalist”
– The Boston Globe
“Paula Robison is unquestionably one of the great living flute virtuosi, one who has dedicated years to exploring the technique of the instrument, to teaching, and to writing textbooks, but she is also a deeply-read humanist with many diverse interests in all the arts and in art’s relation to humanity… she has worked to extend the tonal range of the flute even beyond what she first mastered, and to render it fully capable of expressing the subtlest nuances of human feeling through phrasing and tone-color, which, in her playing, are so closely-related as to be inseparable”
“My best pupil and my very good friend….natural, as in the music of Mozart”
– Marcel Moyse
“Perhaps the greatest flute soloist of her generation”
– Julius Baker
“I would like to think of Paula strolling in and out of my geodesic dome giving to humanity the heavenly music which she has the genius to hear and the gift to communicate to the many”
– Buckminster Fuller
“The Meryl Streep of the flute”
– John Guare
“There is only one sound in the world like this flute. It’s a sound that makes your heart sing”
– Paul Robeson Jr.
“Paula Robison, who plays ‘Syrinx’ as if she were Pan, making it up as she goes along, gave the solo piece as fetching a performance as this listener has ever heard. Her mixture of pure tone and sensuous phrase must be what Debussy had in mind”
– The New York Times
“A performance of shimmering nobility. The sheer rapture of Robison’s phrasing was all in the subtleties: her superbly efficient, unassuming use of breath control invited the listener in for closer inspection. It is a tribute to Robison’s complete control of her instrument that she makes the most of the simplest melodic lines and the most cherishable twists of phrasing. Time and time again she did this in the concert, sharing soft, long-breathed whispers that never lost their tonal luster”
– San Francisco Classical Voice
“Her playing is illuminated by a wonderful sense of fantasy that searches out the music’s inner being”
– The Pittsburgh Gazette
“Personality suffuses Ms. Robison’s playing. She is mistress of the pregnant pause, the delicate inflection, the surprising turn of phrase. But the music itself is always the focal point, never the vehicle with which to show off the performer”
– The Atlanta Constitution
“Her playing weds impeccable breath control and dexterity to a tone that seems to inhabit the entire color spectrum with uniform lusciousness. If an infectious charm and vitality informs her playing, that is because Ms Robison knows how to balance her own natural gifts with style, sensitivity, taste, and, above all, a musical integrity that never falters”
– The Chicago Tribune
“Robison’s playing is fabulously long-breathed and flexible in phrase, varied and opulent in tone, and urgently communicative. Robison is concerned with meanings and emotions that transcend the centuries”
– The Boston Globe
“Paula Robison plays exquisitely. The intense humanity of her playing has only deepened with time”
– The Washington Post
“A rare artist who can make the flute sound both sensuous and classically pure… An absolute wonder”
– The New York Times
“Robison has a beautiful tone which is beautifully varied as is crucial for the recital flute, but rare to this degree. It’s full as needs be, but then narrows down on the music’s demand to a fine line thread, which in itself acquires different timbre while sustaining pure intonation. That says it all for flute playing”
– The San Francisco Chronicle
“She doesn’t seem constricted by the complexities of a score, but rather channels intensity into more direct musical communion. Every phrase she sounds has wit, warmth, grace, point. There is something angelic about her playing. When, at the close of Leon Kirchner’s ‘Flutings for Paula’ she uttered a hushed, lingering high tonic, the very air seemed silvery”
– The Washington Post
“….the music of Paula Robison’s flute spun like gold among the trees on a starry night”
– The Los Angeles Times
“The Orchestra laid out a cushioned, exotic tapestry of sound, from which Ms. Robison soared triumphant, like a breath of clear air”
– The Wall Street Journal
“She makes beautiful music on that golden rod, producing handsome, expressive tones, articulating assertive musical sentences, flying through quick passages easily and with brio. The melding of glamour and art always makes critics nervous, but it can be viable. Even irresistible”
– The Los Angeles Times
“In her hands the instrument was not merely a flute, but also a violin, birds and opera singers”
– The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Her performance of Mozart’s Concerto No.1 in G possessed all the technical agility, heart’s ease, and winsome charm one could ask”
– Detroit Free Press
“No flutist alive plays this blithe piece with more elegance and plasticity of phrase than Paula Robison”
– The New York Times
“The audience cheered the composition, the commanding soloist Paula Robison, and the sensitive accompaniment of the Orchestra”
– Weiner Zeitung
“How natural she is! We had only to hear one phrase and we were entranced”
– La Tribune de Geneve
“The American soloist was a total pleasure. With humor and fantasy she interpreted the concerto as a living dramatic scene. Instead of relying on singing sound and self-serving virtuosity, she used all the equipment of a fine actor to express the language of the music… thus Paula Robison became in this demanding and angular work a poetic storyteller”
– Politiken, Copenhagen
“She took on a tough program at the Bing Theater of the County Museum of Art Wednesday night, with the first half weighted toward American composers-often young ones-and the second anchored in France. Moreover, Robison pulled it off with style and flair, as well as formidable technique. She is compulsively theatrical, constantly in motion, aiming her instrument at several, often unorthodox, angles, at times bearing down with startling aggression. But she also maintained sensitive balances with her pianist, Timothy Hester, who provided assertive, clearly etched, even driving accompaniments”
– The Los Angeles Times
“Such fierce power from a flutist forces a listener to sit up and take notice”
– The Washington Post
“Sequenza II by Luciano Berio is notable for its capriciousness that is cherishable, and Paula Robison made it especially so”
– The New Yorker
“Her name is inscribed in the history of her instrument”
– Fanfare Magazine
