After a tough gig in Ljubljana the Resonance Ensemble gets on the bus at 5am on Wednesday the 14th and travels 12 hours to Krakow to perform in a large warehouse space reconstructed into a performance venue called Fabryka. The space is huge but the band sticks to our approach of playing all acoustic (aside from the bass amp). Makeshift lighting makes reading the scores difficult, the room is so big it’s hard to heat. Despite exhaustion and a challenging environment the band pulls together beautifully, more than “recovering” from the flawed concert in Ljubljana- we nail the new composition, and the musicians play with real energy. The hardest part falls on Per-Åke Holmlander’s shoulders, driving the music and holding together the complex system of vamps on a number of the tunes, doing this on the tuba without any PA support. The ensemble celebrates at Alchemia after the show, a bit like old times with friends from earlier days hanging out and catching up; a tremendous night. The next day it’s buy generic online back to work: bus all day to Poznan, set up in a new acoustic, run through material, a sandwich and coffee (I finish up parts on a second new piece between soundcheck and the gig), then showtime. It’s clear at this concert that Resonance has hit it’s stride- Mark Tokar has learned the bass parts after being thrown into a completely new set of material, the musicians are thinking as a group and understanding the organizational systems for the music (the structures for the compositions can be reorganized from night to night, as can the soloists and improvising groups, so it’s necessary to know and execute the parts no matter where they hit during the course of each piece. The group has also benefitted from the fact that after the first two shows, each concert has had two sets- more time to play, less material to concentrate on for each section. The group in action at our concert in Vienna:
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