Players from quintet arrange, compose much of repertoire
Imani Winds is an ensemble that creates its own opportunities. Since the repertoire for five wind instruments is small, Imani’s flutist Valerie Coleman and French horn player Jeff Scott compose and arrange works for their Grammy-nominated group.
Five of the six pieces being presented during their Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival performance at St. Francis Auditorium on Saturday night were either arranged or composed by Coleman and Scott. The jazz standard “Afro Blue,” which was written by Mongo Santamaria, was arranged for Imani Winds by Coleman. Scott arranged Astor Piazzolla’s “Fuga Y Misterio and Libertango” for the ensemble.
“Kites Over Havana” by Paquito D’Rivera is a piece that was written for Imani Winds, plus an extra clarinet and the piano. When the work was premiered in New York’s Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center in 2004, D’Rivera played the second clarinet part.
“Valerie arranged it for the five of us so we can play it by ourselves,” explained Imani’s bassoonist Monica Ellis by phone from Oregon. “We’ve made some changes to her arrangement, tweaking it a little and switching notes within parts. With the piano part no longer in the piece, we wanted to make sure it sounds rich with just the five of us.”
“Portraits of Josephine Baker” is a five-movement suite written by Coleman to celebrate the life and spirit of Baker, an American-born singer, dancer and civil rights activist. The suite is part of a multimedia production with singing, dancing, film and percussion that Coleman and Scott put together in 2006 to honor Baker, who was born in 1906 in St. Louis and died in 1975 in Paris, France.
“Valerie’s music is cerebral,” said Ellis. “It’s an introverted look at Baker’s life. The music that Jeff wrote to accompany film clips in the multimedia production is very different from Valerie’s. This suite has music of both composers in it. It’s an extraction of music from the multimedia production that can stand alone and still make sense. I think it captures the essence of Josephine Baker’s life.”
Imani Winds will return to the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival on July 27 and 28 to play Roberto Sierra’s festival co-commission “Concierto De Cámara” with the Miami String Quartet. The idea for the piece came out of an ambitious project that Imani Winds started a few years ago.
“We realized we were coming up on our 10th anniversary in 2007,” Ellis said. “We thought it would be great if we commissioned 10 composers of Afro-American and Latin descent, which represents our backgrounds, to create works for us. Roberto Sierra is the second composer in this project. He told us that he wanted to write a piece for a group larger than a quintet and asked us what we thought about winds and strings. That’s how ‘Concierto De Cámara’ came into being.”
Ellis describes the work as a technically advanced piece with intricately woven melodic lines and a big sound. Since Imani Winds doesn’t have the resources to fund this and other commissions, they’ve appreciated financial support from a number of organizations and educational institutions, including the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.
Other festival programs presented in the upcoming week include a concert of works by Mozart, Schubert, Schumann and Ginastera, an all-Schumann program at noon on Thursday in St. Francis Auditorium and a Baroque music concert on Saturday afternoon in St. Francis Auditorium.
“The Bach ‘Sonata in A for Flute & Harpsichord’ is one of only two sonatas Bach wrote for flute and obbligato harpsichord,” said harpsichordist Kathleen McIntosh, who will play the piece on Saturday with flutist Janice Tipton. “A section of the piece near the end got damaged. Bach’s writing was lost. A number of different composers have reconstructed that section. We chose a version that we think was done particularly well. The ending, however, is all Bach.”
If You Go
WHAT: Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival
WHERE: Upcoming week of concerts take place at St. Francis Auditorium in the New Mexico Museum of Art and the KiMo Theatre in Albuquerque
COST: $33-$83; noon concerts $15
CONTACT: (505) 988-1234. For a detailed schedule: www.sfcmf.org
