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Imani Winds
A whole world of music
November 16, 2010
Not that there isn’t plenty of
life in the old stories, but it’s good to hear some new ones now and
then, from different climes, with different points of view, told with
verve and skill.
Enter the Imani Winds. First heard locally a few years ago in a
memorable Carver Center concert joined by Paquito D’Rivera, the New
York-based woodwind quintet made a very welcome return visit to town on
Nov. 14, this time on the San Antonio Chamber Music Society series at
Temple Beth-El.
The troupe started in familiar territory with an arrangement of the
Scherzo from Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music for “A Midsummer
Night’s Dream,” but the rest of the program was contemporary and
culturally diverse.
Most interesting were pieces by Julio Medaglia of Brazil, Wayne Shorter
of the United States and Daniel Schnyder, a Swiss native living in New
York.
Medaglia was represented by his
Suite “Belle Epoch in Sud-America.” It comprises three compact,
almost-too-short movements with Brazilian folk feeling in their bones,
wrapped in a sophisticated skin of disciplined compositional
craftsmanship. There’s also a quirky wit to this music, especially in
the tango “El Porsche Negro” and the rollicking chorinho “Crazy Baby Clarinet.”
Shorter started his career as one of the most thoughtful of the
hard-bop saxophonists of the 1960s, but his subsequent journey took him
far afield into free jazz and fusion. Eventually he latched onto the
extended classical tradition, but with distinctive twists.
He composed “Terra Incognita” for the Imani Winds, which gave the
premiere in 2006. The piece allows the players to improvise and to
alter its structure freely, so it can’t be fully pinned down, but the
constants are dense, very beautiful harmonies, lovely melodies or
melodic fragments, and lively interplay that sometimes recalls Arnold
Schoenberg’s counterpoint.
Schnyder’s Woodwind Quintet
melds the Modernist classical tradition with jazz, pop and blues ideas.
The fast opening movement and the superfast finale also include
good deal of delightful nuttiness. For the two middle movements, oboist
Toyin Spellman-Diaz switched to English horn and delivered some bluesy
feeling, most notably in the slow movement’s tender theme.
The Imani Winds' flutist, Valerie Coleman, is also a composer. There’s
much to like in her three-movement “Afro-Cuban Concerto” -- some
elaborate and very engaging solos, ambitious counterpoint, an
attractive neo-classical idiom with infectious Afro-Cuban rhythms and
inflections. But the music in the first two movements seems too studied
and conservative. In the finale, however, Coleman busts loose,
communicates more freely and builds to a wild conclusion.
All five players were first-class. In addition to Coleman and
Spellman-Diaz, they were clarinetist Mariam Adam, bassoonist Monica
Ellis and hornist Jeff Scott. Adam was given the biggest cache of showy
material, which she played with considerable aplomb. Not least was her
virtuosic and convincingly stylish -- or perhaps the right term is shtetlish -- work in a pair of
klezmer dances.
Mike
Greenberg
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