KARACHI: It was a rare treat. It doesn’t happen very often that one gets to hear a wind quintet playing, with a fair degree of improvisation, classical music in front of a Pakistani audience. Well, it happened on Wednesday at the Alliance Francaise de Karachi when the quintet Le Concert Impromptu performed in the last leg of their Pakistani tour.

The band comprised Yves Charpentier (flute), Violaine Dufes (oboe), Jean-Christophe Murer (clarinet), Guillaume Merlin (cor) and Pierre Fatus (basson). The musicians began the concert in a rather unusual fashion: at the start of the first composition they entered the stage one by one, gently, carefully holding their instruments in their hands, creating an aura of mystique. It was essential for the kind of music that they played — classical, baroque, romantic.

The second piece that the band played was a composition by Jean-Philippe Rameau, described by a band member as a composition about the “meeting of nations”. It was done in seven movements. The first had a cascading sound, with moments of jocundity in it. The second was a tad sluggish, but mellifluous. The third started off with a honeyed fluty sound and carried on that way till the end. The fourth had a lilting feel to it with run-on notes. The fifth changed the tempo with a rapid progression and a lovely melody structure. The sixth came down to a meditative tone. The seventh and final part of the piece had a high-pitched urgency to it.

The third item was ‘Pavane pour une infante defunte’ (Pavane for a dead princess) by Maurice Ravel. It was a beautifully rendered tune played with a lot of heart by the band. It was marked by long, lingering notes that conjured a sombre atmosphere. The audience listened to it with rapt attention because its auditory value also had a visual quality to it as if one was hearing the soundtrack of a period drama.

In order to emphasise the diversity of their taste in music, the penultimate piece of the evening that the musicians played was a composition inspired by their trip to Africa. It was a kind of an experiment where a particular sound was continuously played and each musician improvised on it.

The last piece of the concert was a two-part composition, the first of which focused on the movement of clouds.

Published in Dawn, October 27th, 2017