By JAMES D. WATTS JR. Scene Writer on Oct 2, 2011, at 6:41 PM Updated on 10/02 at 6:41 PM
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The Imani Wind Quintet opened Chamber Music Tulsa’s season Sunday with an afternoon of great dance tunes.
This New York City-based ensemble, which has been together for more than a decade, devotes a major portion of its creative endeavors to performing music that comes from outside the typical parameters of “classical music.”
Sunday afternoon’s performance at the Tulsa PAC, for example, included a work by a Canadian composer Bill Douglas, that blends the tight formalism of baroque music with the primal yet complex rhythms of African music, as well as an arrangement by the group’s French horn player, Jeff Scott, of Astor Piazzolla’s “Libertango,” which like much of this composer’s work, takes the rhythms and melodies of dance music and elevates them into art.
Even the one piece that was as close to “standard repertoire” as the Imani Winds got Sunday – an arrangement of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” – was hardly standard. Yet stripping away the strings and percussion of the full score, and focusing entirely on the five voices of the wind instruments, still made for a surprisingly effective piece, one that had all the brutal force and naïve beauty of the original.
And it was a ballet score – music that was created so people could dance.
Every piece on the program had a definite rhythmic character – a good, even necessary thing when one is performing music that might be outside the comfort zone of people expecting Beethoven and Mozart. Rhythm immediately draws the listener in – the way that the quintet quickly got the audience snapping their fingers in time with a section of the first piece they played, “Red Clay and Mississippi Delta,” an original composition by the group’s flutist, Valerie Coleman, which drew strongly from jazz and blues traditions.
As players, the Imani quintet are a formidable bunch, each capable of great expressiveness in their playing. Clarinetist Mariam Adam handled everything from a kind of Dixieland swing to the vocal-like swoops and keening of klezmer music (this in the last section of Gamal Abdel-Rahim’s “The East Suite), while bassoonist Monica Ellis’ powerfully pure and singing tone made this so-called “clown of the orchestra” sound as uptown-sophisticated and downtown-gritty as you could want.
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