United States Various – ‘Tuesday Musical Akron’: Boston Brass, Imani Winds. EJ Thomas Performing Arts Hall at the University of Akron, 10.2.2026. (MSJ)
Works by: Shostakovich, Piazzolla, D’Rivera, Bernstein, Hindemith, Schifrin, Wonder, Sandoval, Ruiz, Moore, Lecuona
Boston Brass: José Sibaja, trumpet; Jeff Connor, trumpet; Chris Castellanos, horn; Domingo Pagliuca, trombone; William Russell, tuba
Imani Winds: Brandon Patrick George, flute; Mekhi Gladden, oboe; Mark Dover, clarinet; Kevin Newton, horn and vocal; Monica Ellis, bassoon
The Tuesday Musical Akron concert series featured a crowd-pleasing meeting of two accomplished ensembles, the wind quintet Imani Winds and the brass quintet Boston Brass. The two alternated selections before joining together to make a grand dectet for a few numbers.
The Boston Brass started things off with a snappy arrangement of a ‘Galop’ by Shostakovich that highlighted the ensemble’s fantastic coordination and daredevil virtuosity. Piazzolla’s ‘Verano Porteno’ followed, in an arrangement by group member José Sibaja that showed off their expressive range in the Argentinian composer’s tango-based style. Between numbers, members bantered with the audience to introduce works and, in all but one awkward gap, cover the stage business of rearranging chairs.
Imani Winds took the stage next, playing a selection of three movements from Paquito D’Rivera’s Aires Tropicales, which is less than half of the work. It proved so expressive, stimulating and original that this listener, for one, would have forgone several of the other short works on the program to hear more of this piece. Particularly engaging was Monica Ellis’s bassoon playing which propelled the ensemble, while Brandon Patrick George’s scintillating flute and Mekhi Gladden’s sinuous oboe (and in places, English horn) countered Mark Dover’s perky clarinet and Kevin Newton’s lyrical French horn.
The two ensembles joined together for trombonist Domingo Pagliuca’s deft arrangements of ‘Maria’ from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story and an aria from Piazzolla’s Maria de Buenos Aries, a tragic opera. While there are inherent difficulties in putting a wind quintet and a brass quintet together on stage, these arrangements found enterprising ways to feature all the players and not just reduce the woodwinds to stage scenery smothered by the power of the brass. The first half of the concert closed with tubist William Russell’s arrangement of the final march from Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphoses of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber. Russell admitted it did not fit with the largely Latin theme of the concert, but he pointed out that a running theme in the selections was the idea of immigrants creating music in the places they went, which certainly ties in Hindemith who fled from the Nazis to America.
The second half opened with the Imani Winds playing an arresting two-part piece by Lalo Schifrin called ‘La Nouvelle Orleans’, a tribute to the New Orleans tradition of following a funeral dirge with dancing music to celebrate life. Virtuosity and bold color marked the vital performance, descriptors which were positively doubled in clarinetist Mark Dover’s arrangement of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Overjoyed’. As Dover pointed out in his introduction, Wonder is rightly regarded as the head of the modern chapter of the collection of songs that has become informally known over the years as the ‘Great American Songbook’. Popular music often becomes absorbed into the classical tradition, and this arrangement demonstrated how brilliantly it can be done. Vivid reinventions of the original track were abetted here by the unexpected starring role for French horn player Kevin Newton, who at one point put down his horn and sang the words with complete assurance. One can only hope Imani will continue mining this thread for future projects.
The ensembles joined for a new piece that was written expressly for the ten players by jazz master Arturo Sandoval. Metales y Maderas (Brass and Woodwinds) explores the melodic possibilities of the instruments with a lyrical first movement, a haunting slow movement and a livelier finale. Reflecting his jazz background, Sandoval focused on spinning out melodic ideas over repeated chord progressions that remained mostly fixed. The playing was immaculate, particularly Sibaja’s piccolo trumpet solos.
Boston Brass performed two popular numbers, Pablo Beltrán Ruiz’s ‘Sway’ and Stanton Moore’s ‘Blues for Ben’, which opened with a staggeringly virtuosic workout for the tuba before segueing into a general romp for the brass. Imani Winds rejoined them for a final showpiece that gave everyone starring moments, Ernesto Lecuona’s ‘Malaguena’, arranged by Chris Castellanos. The audience reception was enthusiastic, but the sheer length of the concert – nearly two and a half hours with intermission – precluded a large encore, so the Boston Brass played everyone offstage with a touch of ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’.
Mark Sebastian Jordan