by Kevin McLaughlin
On the cold Tuesday evening of February 10, two venerable ensembles — the Imani Winds and Boston Brass — were brought together by Akron’s Tuesday Musical in E.J. Thomas Hall. The large audience was ready for something lively, and the players obliged, spending the better part of two hours passing enthralling music back and forth.
Outfitted in blue jackets, Boston Brass — José Sibaja and Jeff Conner (trumpets), Chris Castellanos (horn), Domingo Pagliuca (trombone), and William Russell (tuba) — introduced pieces and corrected each other’s pronunciation with good humor. “You may be wondering how guys in those jackets get work,” Conner quipped. José Sibaja, who grew up in Puerto Rico, took particular care with Spanish names, and was playfully merciless when his colleagues missed a vowel.
Dmitri Shostakovich’s Galop, one of the composer’s theater pieces from the 1930s, was up first. Articulation stayed clean even at the fast tempo, and the group reveled in the music’s dry humor. Sibaja and Conner impressed with their technical ease, while Pagliuca and Russell kept things grounded.
Already no strangers to Northeast Ohio, Imani Winds are quickly turning last summer’s debut at the Kent Blossom Music Festival into an annual event. For the second year in a row, the wind quintet visited Kent State University’s Ludwig Recital Hall on July 2 to perform on the Festival’s Faculty Concert Series.
Given Imani Winds’ active touring schedule, it’s not unusual to see the group revisit the same part of the U.S. within a few months. So while it might feel like the wind quintet was just here for their March performance in Oberlin, July 3 saw them return to Northeast Ohio to appear on the Kent Blossom Music Festival’s Faculty Concert Series in Ludwig Recital Hall. Thankfully, this proximity was no issue — Imani is a group worth hearing again and again.
Midway through a recent concert by the Imani Winds, the group’s newest member, hornist Kevin Newton, stepped up to the microphone. Introducing a piece by Henri Tomasi, Newton highlighted a particular quote attributed to the French composer: “Music that doesn’t come from the heart isn’t music.”