Prayer

This is what prayer sounds like. Five notes on a flute, a sudden flair of marimba, a splay of harp notes, a throbbing steel drum, tiny temple bells, a huge gong followed by massive alto wind chimes hung from the ceiling and pulled by five ribbons in the colors of the five elements. At the climax, a duet between a darabuka (Arabic drum) and five tom-toms, the two percussionists watching each other, improvising, singing to each other, pausing and rising together, then falling apart, watching, building on each other’s tempos like well-tuned bodies making love.

Toru Takemitsu wrote the score to Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 film, Ran, and then five years later wrote the piece the Oregon Symphony played tonight, which Takemitsu calls a prayer. The title is From Me Flows What You Call Time, taken from a poem by Makoto Ooka.

The program says the estimated duration was thirty-six minutes, but I don’t believe that. It goes beyond time. It is incredibly fast-moving, tender, punctuated by silence, filled with pulses. Introducing it, Carlos Kalmar explained, “It draws you in and never lets you go.” And so it is. It is without exception the most exquisite percussion performance I’ve ever heard, even including a mind-boggling Bartok by Evelyn Glennie.

There were five solo percussionists in addition to the full orchestra, and the percussion was punctuated by great sighs of violins, violas, cellos, oboes, horns, clarinets, and celesta.

Thanks to Bookworm for finding the Nexus version online here. Nothing can compare with the thrill of feeling it live, in your body. We sat on the third row, center, courtesy of Portland’s wonderful arts program that provides unsold tickets for only $5 to people who qualify as impoverished. But this is wealth beyond measure: to feel the vibrations enter your body and sing in your bones.

After all that, there was a lush, sensual Scheherazade.  A person could levitate from happiness.

This picture was taken before it all started, as the orchestra was tuning up.