Wall Street Journal: "Ay, Marimba!"

By WILL FRIEDWALD for the Wall Street Journal
Minneapolis — May 5, 2010

For most of the history of jazz and American pop, the vibraphone has ruled unchallenged as the leading mallet instrument. Not so, however, in international classical and folk music circles—here the marimba reigns supreme. Its dominance was vividly illustrated at "Marimba 2010," a recent three-day festival and conference at the University of Minnesota.

Typically six feet long with a range of up to five octaves, the marimba is so large that many players have to dart back and forth between the low and high ends—small wonder that playing it often seems as much a dance as a musical performance. The sound of the mallets hitting its wooden pads and then resonating through metal tubes is a glorious thing—acoustic, dark and otherworldly, like little else in music.

The daytime, mostly chamber-music performances at the university's Ted Mann Concert Hall and nighttime events around the Twin Cities made clear the marimba's amazing role in classical and world music. "Marimba 2010" presented everything from Renaissance music to Mozart, Prokofiev, Debussy and no end of contemporary classical composers, as well as indigenous marimba traditions from the Carribean, Africa, East Asia, the Americas, Russia, Scandinavia and across Europe.

Marimbas were heard in smaller ensembles during the day; I caught about 10 hours of these shows, usually with three or four performers or groups to an hour-long set. The composer best represented was Steve Reich, the 73-year-old minimalist. I heard at least a half-dozen of his pieces, such as "Music for Pieces of Wood" and "Mallet Quartet," played by various ensembles, all of which seemed like variations on what Mr. Reich describes as "beats out of phase," similar rhythms played slightly out of sync with each other. The description sounds recondite, but the music is accessible and pleasurable.

Mr. Reich's work was well-played by Brooklyn-based So Percussion in the Thursday evening concert at the Southern Theater. This quartet plays an enormous range of instruments, including every species of hand or mallet-struck implement known to man—they obviously drive a truck from gig to gig.

Two contemporary European composer-players, the French Eric Sammut and the Serbian Nebojsa Jovan Zivkovic, offered music that was more melodic—in fact, sounding like high-end movie music, combining marimba with strings. Mr. Zivkovic performed his "Concerto No. 2 for Marimba and Orchestra" with the full Minnesota Orchestra conducted by Osmo Vänskä; the juxtaposition of "jungle" percussion with symphonic scoring brought to mind Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" and James Horner's "Avatar" score. It was a suitably dramatic work, complete with an improvised cadenza in the center, that made a worthy opener for the Mahler Seventh Symphony that followed. Mr. Sammut's rapturous "Sugaria," with a string octet, could have been a 1960s spy-film theme.

If this event were the Olympics of marimba, it would be a toss-up whether Taiwan or Japan brought home the gold. "Atom Hearts Club Duo," an intriguing piece by the Japanese composer Takashi Yoshimatsu, suggested rhythm and blues transmuted into classical marimba format. His contryman, Takayoshi Yoshioka, offered a Sousa-like march, a Strauss-like waltz, and the exciting "Three Dances," which suggested something that Leonard Bernstein might have written had "West Side Story" been set in Tokyo.

Still, the climax of the chamber series was easily "Solar Myth" by Chung-Ying Chang. This explosively theatrical work incorporated ambitious choreography, as soloist Pei-Ching Wu (in red opera gloves) and three masked members of the university percussion ensemble acted out a Taiwanese folk tale, dancing around the marimba even as they played it.

The big concert event was "Mallets and Melodies" in the Cathedral of St. Paul. The idea was to combine up to 20 separate marimbas and 30 players with the VocalEssence choir, which includes up to 120 voices. The evening started with Gabrieli's "Magnificat à 33," in which the singers were placed in the front and back of the church and the marimbas at the sides. It was the most immersive performance I've ever experienced, far more than a digital 3-D film.

The major new commissions of the choral concert were Jorge Córduba's "Aquí ha nacido el tiempo" and Stephen Paulus's "Visions" and "Pilgrims' Hymn." In the first, built around the Mexican quartet Marimba Nandayapa, the voices sounded remotely medieval while the marimbas sounded dissonantly postmodern, but somehow they all came together. The cathedral is so big that it has an eight-second delay. Mr. Paulus turned that potential liability into an asset. In his pieces, the voices and the marimbas were much more sonorously blended, making it hard to tell where one began and the other ended.

The concert also featured Samuel Barber's "Adagio," transposed for marimbas, which sounded murky—this is a work better suited to a concert hall than a cathedral—and the new a capella commission "In Paradisum." The latter was the work of 22-year-old Eric Sayre, now a music-education student at the University of Iowa. Throughout this purely choral piece, somehow I kept hearing marimbas in my head. When, after the final concert on Saturday, I started seeing and hearing marimbas in my sleep, I knew it was time to head home.

Mr. Friedwald writes about jazz for the Journal.