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Over the past several years, Zuill Bailey, music director of Northwest BachFest and Music at Manito, has transformed that yearly gathering in the park from a delightful evening of familiar music by Mozart among others, performed by the cream of local musical talent into a showcase in which to display the cutting edge of current music trends, as displayed in the work of its most adventurous and open-minded performers, some of whom he brought here from places and traditions very distant from ours. This week’s program for Music at Manito is no exception. Each item shows both composer and performer crossing boundaries in ways un-dreamed of in past years. The result may have been challenging for concertgoers (and critics) whose musical background was bookended by Bach and Rachmaninov, but meeting the challenge was rewarded by an experience thrilling in its instrumental mastery, passionate communication and creative brilliance.
The program fell into two segments. In the first, violinist Helen Kim was joined by Zuill Bailey, cello; Greg Presley, piano; and a select quintet of players from the string sections of the Spokane Symphony in works by Charles Camille Saint-Saens, Johan Halvorsen and Astor Piazzolla. In the second segment, a very extraordinary trio of musicians calling themselves the Baribá Union collaborated both vocally and instrumentally in performing a set of songs composed by members of the group. The Baribá Union is comprised of Mike Block, cello; Christylez Bacon, beatbox and electric guitar; and Patricia Ligia, electric bass.
Beginning the program with a trio by Saint-Saens may have seemed like playing it safe, but in fact, the more familiar one was with the music of the composer and of the period (1910), the more surprising it was. A free-form duet of violin and piano, especially one which depicts a dramatic dialogue between a poet and his muse, would have been highly original – perhaps unprecedented. What mattered more to the audience at Manito Park was the beguiling beauty and emotional force of the music, which unfolded with a captivating freedom and spontaneity that is most uncharacteristic of the music of Saint Saens, whose name stood for formal discipline in the music of his time.
Because both the violin and cello parts in this work are of equal importance, their precise coordination is both more important and more difficult than usual. One assumes that both Kim and Bailey have come only recently to know The Poet and His Muse, but one would never know it from the effortless ease and perfect ensemble they displayed throughout. Kim exhibited exceptional control over the tonal shading with which she formed each phrase. At one point, for example, she so altered the quality of her tone that one would have thought she had laid down one instrument and picked up another. This exceptional control over tone color – a sequence of skills that begins with acute listening and ends with perfect control over the bow – is one that Helen Kim exploited to great advantage later in the program.
As to Zuill Bailey’s playing, it exhibited the chronic deficiency which one has come to expect: an absolute inability to play a single phrase in a way that is in any way routine or inexpressive. Under his bow, every passage springs spontaneously to life. His astounding dynamic range and ability to maintain the intensity of a phrase even when almost inaudibly soft was particularly remarkable in the park, since everyone’s playing was heavily amplified, which ordinarily compresses dynamic range. In any event, no attempt to describe playing of this quality has any hope of success; it forces one to resort either to dry-as-dust technical jargon or pretentious metaphor. Art of Bailey’s caliber will not fit in any box language can construct.
Greg Presley, who holds the position of pianist with the Spokane Symphony, played for us with the same apparently effortless assurance and coloristic resourcefulness we saw when he partnered with Bailey in his memorable recital several months ago at Hamilton Studio’s Listening Room. In this instance, he was asked to take the place of a string orchestra, which he did without depriving us with any of the richness of texture or lyricism which the larger ensemble would have produced.
Between 1965 and 1970, the Argentine composer and virtuoso of the bandoneon (a reduced type of accordion, played by buttons rather than keys), Astor Piazzolla composed four brief pieces evoking the character of the four seasons in Buenos Aires. We heard an arrangement by Leonid Desyatnikov for violin solo and string orchestra, the parts of which, in addition to Kim’s solo violin were taken by members of the Spokane Symphony: David Armstrong, violin; Jessie Morozov, violin; Jeannette Wee-Yang, viola; Johannes Kleinmann, cello; and Kim Plewniak, bass.
The subtle deployment of tone color we observed in Helen Kim’s playing in the Saint-Saens tone poem was brought to the fore in Four Seasons in Buenos Aires (Estaciones Portenas). Along with the silvery, clearly-focused tone she normally produces, Kim allowed her tone to take on the keening, urgently sexual quality of an Argentinian tango singer – a tone which is naturally produced by the bandoneon. Combine this with virtuoso feats she accomplished with the bow and fingerboard, and you get a thoroughly engaging, sometimes mesmerizing experience – one for which the audience was, and will remain grateful.
To the sultry, confrontational sexuality expressed by Piazzolla, Mike Block, Chistylez Bacon and Patricia Ligia – members of Biriba Union – offered us the gentle, casual amorousness of Brazil. There is nothing casual, however, about their attitude to performing this music, or to their control over their voices and instruments, which is fanatically perfectionist and virtuosic to a degree that is scarcely believable. Block, for example, employs the cello both as a solo instrument and to accompany the full-throated use of his very attractive tenor voice. He does not, however, as one might assume, remain seated with the cello. Rather, he employs a special carbon fiber body / spruce top instrumental which he straps to his chest and plays – flawlessly – while singing, accompanying his colleagues and ranging about the stage.
Christylez Bacon, in addition to playing the electric guitar with sophisticated ease, is a beatbox musician. For those readers who may not be familiar with the term or heard it for the first time only recently (last week), “beatbox” refers to the set of skills required to imitate a group of percussion instruments using only one’s mouth and larynx and a microphone. He is, furthermore, a rap singer of amazing fluency, capable of reeling off long, complex paragraphs of irresistibly rhythmic speech with perfect clarity and engaging expression.
Bassist Patricia Ligia imparts grace, brilliance and imagination to the playing of an instrument commonly thought incapable of doing more than providing the low note in the harmonic progression of a song. Somehow, she is also able to reproduce on her instrument the warm tonal character of her beautiful alto singing voice
Still, all of the remarkable and unique skills possessed by Biribá Union would provide would be mere transitory entertainment, were it not for the fact that they are all used in the service of expressing their possessors’ intense love of music and commitment to its power to better the lives of all who are fortunate enough to hear and see them. Seeing them is important, because it transforms a musical experience into a theatrical one, as we behold these three gifted individuals from wildly different cultural, geographical and ethnic backgrounds brought together into a symphonic singularity through the power of art.
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