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PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
Concert Review
November 5, 2007
By Peter Dobrin
COLEMAN DEBUTS A NEW CONCERTO
For all its surface likability, cinematic sweep and tunefulness, Valerie Coleman's new concerto for woodwind quintet and small orchestra is a fairly complex work. One minute it's charming you with a memorable pulsing rhythm, and the next you realize the repeated figure in question isn't quite as simple as your ear first made it out to be.
Coleman's Concerto Afro-Cuban for Wind Quintet and Orchestra was premiered Saturday night at the Independence Seaport Museum by her own group, Imani Winds, and an ensemble of regular (and not so regular) Orchestra 2001 members led by conductor James Freeman. To say that this combination of forces doesn't have much repertoire at its disposal is an understatement, so Coleman's contribution arrives like rain on parched earth.
Quite aside from its novelty of genre, though, Coleman's concerto is a wonderfully substantive piece. Her expansive sense of melody evokes the best in movie music.
A spirited orchestra part (an ensemble of strings, brass, percussion, harp and piano) knows just when to bump up against the soloists and when to back away. And for each of her Imani colleagues, Coleman (the group's flutist) wrote meaty parts. I'm particularly in love with the role she gave hornist Jeff Scott, which was unusually sensitive to his strengths - his easy sense of freedom, and a manipulation of tone that suggests something downright vocal.
But what's striking about Imani is that each player is polished and virtuosic. They took the first half of the program by themselves, giving elfin accounts of scherzos by Franck and Bozza. In an arrangement of Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin by horn legend Mason Jones, each player in the ensemble was a marvelously agile proxy for a full orchestra. The only programming quest ion mark was a Mozart divertimento in which six O2001 and Imani players joined forces.
Why this piece, especially when the better fit might have been something from Imani's recent CD? It's an incredibly inventive doff to Josephine Baker, which would have resonated well with an O2001 that set out this season to explore all things French. Incredibly, the programming juxtaposition made Mozart sound like something he never does, the stiff classicist.
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