Early yesterday evening, as SF Music Day was winding down into its final sets, Rent Romus’ Life’s Blood Ensemble took over the Dianne and Tad Taube Atrium Theater on the fourth floor of the Veterans Building to premiere Itkuja Suite, which Romus composed jointly with Heikki Koskinen. Only about an hour in duration, this was an undertaking of epic proportions, reflecting on the scale of Finnish poetry that Elias Lönnrot compiled in the nineteenth century as The Kalevala. The literal translation of “itkuja” is “crying;” but, as the preview article for this composition observed, the connotations of the word “entail a more all-encompassing worldview of the concepts of existence, loss, and change.”
Sadly, no printed program was distributed to outline the individual movements of the suite. Romus provided spoken introductions to each of those movements, which were definitely informative. However, they did not remain fixed in memory for very long, often a duration shorter than that of the movement being described! Nevertheless, there was more than enough “in-the-moment listening” to draw and maintain any willingly attentive listener.
Life’s Blood Ensemble members Mark Clifford, Rent Romus, Max Judelson, Heikki Koskinen, Timothy Orr, and Joshua Marshall (from the Ensemble’s Web page, photograph by Peter B Kaars)
The suite was scored for a somewhat nonstandard collection of ten musicians. Romus led while performing primarily on alto and soprano saxophones. He also alternated with different types of flutes and, for one of the movements, the kantele, a traditional Finnish plucked-string instrument. During that movement Koskinen also played kantele, and he similarly joined Romus for the flute passages. However, his primary instrument was an E-trumpet; and he also played tenor recorder. The remaining wind players were Joshua Marshall on tenor and soprano saxophones and Erika Oba alternating among flute, alto flute, and piccolo.
The next instrumental section involved a non-standard balance of resources. In the low strings cellist Max Judelson was joined by two bass players with distinctively different parts, Safa Shokrai and Cory Combs. The diversity of those low-string sonorities complemented the wider diversity of the wind section through extended techniques for both bowing and plucking. Judelson also contributed some seriously mournful solo work, fitting in perfectly with the overall emotional dispositions of the entire suite. On the percussion side Timothy Orr managed a drum kit while Mark Clifford contributed an impressively wide diversity of vibraphone techniques. The ensemble also included Ann McChesney-Young playing accordion; sadly, most of her performance was close to inaudible in the context of all those other instrumental resources.
Taken as a whole, this was music that satisfied anyone willing to commit to attentive listening. Sadly, the overall ambience of SF Music Day was not conceived with attentive listening in mind. The experience is more like that of a trade show, where visitors are free to wander from one booth to another at any time. Most of the spaces in the Veterans Building allow for listeners to enter and leave discreetly at the rear of the audience space. Sadly, this is not the case for the Atrium Theater. As a result, the performance had to contend with streams of visitors both coming and going through the space between the audience and the performers. This definitely did not do the performers any favors!
The fact is that Itkuja deserves a better setting than SF Music Day provided. Mind you, the music itself merited exposure. However, that exposure invited (if not demanded) attentive listening; and, on SF Music Day, focused attention tends to be a sometime thing. Hopefully, Romus and Koskinen will be able to find a more suitable setting within the San Francisco city limits where listeners can approach Itkuja with the serious focus that it merits.
No comments:
Post a Comment