For those not yet familiar with the name, Nomad Session is an octet consisting of four woodwinds (flute, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon) and four brass instruments (horn, trumpet, trombone, and tuba). Last night the group presented the second of the three concerts planned for its second season, which is called simply The Eight. All of the performers are on the young side, eager to make their respective marks; and the ensemble provides an imaginative way to advance toward that goal. The players themselves are Christy Kim (flute), Jesse Barrett (oboe and cor anglais), Jon Szin (clarinet and bass clarinet), Kris King (bassoon), Stephanie Stroud (horn), Ian Cochran (trumpet), Matt Carr (trombone), and Jonathan Seiberlich (tuba). As might be guessed, there is not much written for an octet with these sources; so, for much of the program, King and Stroud also contributed as arrangers.
The other way to establish repertoire, of course, is through commissions. Each of the three concerts in The Eight was planned to premiere a commissioned work. Last night’s commissioned composer was Nicolas Lell Benavides, whose Cool Grey City was premiered by Nomad Session last season. A graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and a founding member of the Guerrilla Composers Guild, Benavides is currently pursuing graduate studies at the University of Southern California.
There he collaborated with Diego Dela Rosa to create a folktale for wind octet and narrator. Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” was clearly an inspiring force; but Benavides’ real inspiration came from his native New Mexico and Juan B. Rael’s anthology of Spanish stories collected in both that state and Colorado. Following Prokofiev’s model, each instrument was associated with one of the tale’s narrative elements. However, both the tale itself and Benavides’ approach to composition were far too uniquely distinctive to be confused with the Prokofiev warhorse.
Indeed, Benavides’ approach to the Nomad Sessions resources was consistently imaginative. Nevertheless, the tale itself tended to be far richer in details than the text that Prokofiev used. Benavides also served as narrator but sat within the semicircle of the Nomad Sessions players, rather than closer to the audience at the edge of the performing area. That meant that, for many, he was out of sight; and visual cues are often valuable when one is trying to listen to unfamiliar text. In other words, this is a piece that still needs a bit of refinement with respect to how it is performed, both musically and as a narrative. Still, it was an impressive undertaking that could do with more exposure.
Spirits were at their highest in the performance of the two dance offerings on the program. King provided the arrangement of the fifth of Johannes Brahms’ “Hungarian” dances. This was the “real warhorse” of the evening; and King’s approach to arrangement always found the right coloration for each of the component themes and phrases. As might be expected with music that always risks succumbing to cliché status, a bit of wit goes a long way to holding audience attention; and King was not shy about finding witty turns for each of the contributing instruments.
In the case of the four dances in Malcolm Arnold’s Opus 59, a set of four dances inspired by (but not actually using) Scottish sources, the wit came from Arnold himself, only to be highlighted in new ways by King, working this time with Stroud. Arnold was born in Northampton, meaning that he, himself, was English, rather than Scottish. While his study of the source material was clearly respectful, the music that resulted tended to go over the top in poking fun at what many would take to be “Scottish clichés.” In Arnold’s case that involved getting a symphony orchestra to mimic a rampant pack of bagpipes, and I have to say that I was more impressed than I had anticipated in the ways in which King and Stroud distilled Arnold’s “Scotch spirits” (pun unabashedly intended) down to Nomad Sessions resources. I’m not sure I have listened to Opus 59 since my undergraduate days, but encountering it again last night was a real hoot.
NASA photograph of Mare Tranquillitatis (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
The program opened with another arrangement. Roger Zare’s “Mare Tranquillitatis” was composed for string orchestra; but Zare himself arranged it for wind ensemble. I can suspect that he may have imagined a richer sound. However, the one-to-a-part playing by Nomad Sessions endowed the music with a distinctive coloration that still evoked the unworldliness of Zare’s musical depiction of the surface of the Moon. (Mare Tranquillitatis was the landing site for Apollo 11.)
Overall, the result was a program in which the more boisterous offerings were bookended by the more reflective ones; and this made for a satisfying evening. Nevertheless, that lively spirit of the dance resurfaced when Nomad Sessions took an encore. The selection was an arrangement (presumably the group’s own) of Astor Piazzolla’s “Libertango,” which definitely left audience members leaving their seats with a bounce in their respective steps.
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