PERFORMING ARTS
Thursday, April 27, 2006; Page C03
Duo Marchand
In Shakespeare's time the art of song captivated English poets and composers as perhaps never before. The Duo Marchand performed a generous assortment of songs set to texts from nine of Shakespeare's plays at the Church of the Epiphany, as part of its noontime Tuesday Concert Series. The weekly series is especially attractive to downtown workers on their lunch break.
In a skilled, cogently thought-out performance, the Duo Marchand -- soprano Marcia Young and lutenist Andy Rutherford -- offered some of the most fetching Elizabethan songs in the repertoire by such leading composers of Shakespeare's day as Thomas Morley, John Dowland and Thomas Campion. Young played a renaissance harp (a small instrument held between the knees) and sang, occasionally doing both. She was joined by Rutherford in a program balancing frothy love songs with grief-ridden plaints. And there was wit aplenty in several songs ending with clever onomatopoeic refrains such as "cock-a-doodle-doo" or "Ding-a-ling-a-ling." Young's gentle voice glided easily between her highest and lowest notes, adhering carefully to phrasing that made both musical and poetic sense.
The duo interspersed some delicately contrived works for lute and harp among the songs. Although the weather caused both players to retune their instruments continually, they captured every emotional color and musical inflection.
-- Cecelia Porter
Imani Winds
It's rare enough to encounter full-time wind quintets performing on the chamber music circuit. But Imani Winds is a true breath of fresh air. This young, prodigiously talented, predominantly female African American and Latin American ensemble performs a mix of 20th-century and contemporary music that accepts no stylistic or continental divisions. The classical music world would do well to take the Imani model to heart.
The group's program at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater on Monday was an eclectic one, honoring the early years of the 20th century with Manuel de Falla's Four Spanish Pieces (in an alternately pungent and suavely impressionistic arrangement by Wayne Peterson), and the post-World War II years with Luciano Berio's witty "Opus Number Zoo." Its text, by innovative opera director Rhoda Levine, received a sly, animated delivery. .
John Harbison's 1979 Quintet for Winds and Lalo Schifrin's 1987 "La Nouvelle Orleans" drew a haunting blend of sound and a battery of flashing, coloristic effects from the ensemble. Schifrin's New Orleans funeral march-based study of death and rebirth was especially moving in light of recent events. But most arresting of all were the pieces arranged by members of the ensemble: Astor Piazzolla's "Libertango," arranged by French hornist Jeff Scott; and the spiritual "Steal Away," arranged by flutist Valerie Coleman. Spiky, harmonically exploratory and full of quasi-vocal effects, these canny arrangements allowed the Imani players to express their individual personalities in engaging solos and bustling musical dialogues.
-- Joe Banno
