November 18th, 2008: Queen Mab Trio / Michel Doneda

@instants chavirés

I had never heard Michel Doneda playing alone, so I was curious about this, because I liked what I heard from him before. Well, I didn’t like his set much. Surprisingly, it wasn’t much the quiet breathing-through-without-a-regular-note part of it that put me off. I even did like some of that. But I never got what it was about apart from sound exploration. And I guess I was not in the mood for that.

Queen Mab Trio were not afraid to play louder at times, which suited me better. That trio features Lori Freedman on clarinet and bass clarinet, Marylin Lerner on piano and Ig Henneman on viola. Another oddity is I liked the bass clarinet better than the viola, despite my fondness for the latter, but that might be because the viola was often a bit drowned out. I liked most of the set, but there were too many times when one was too much to the front, and other times when I thought what each was doing was too close to the others. So I kept feeling there was something missing, and that dampened my appreciation quite a bit. Maybe I was just in a bad mood.