Live improvisation work in front of an audience isn’t exactly the easiest feat for a musician to pull off, yet this is exactly what percussionist Renzo Spiteri is planning for his upcoming performance in conjunction with Thomas Agergaard. He tells Ramona Depares that it’s all about the music and the audience.

Improvised sessions tend to scare audiences away with the fear of being too technical, too highbrow, with maybe a hint of the whole performance being nothing but an excuse for musicians to show off their technique.

The idea is to have the audience fullyengaged

Those who are familiar with Renzo Spiteri’s music will know that this is definitely not the case with his upcoming Improvisations, which will see him joining forces with Danish saxophonist Thomas Agergaard in a performance that will, as the title suggests, be completely spontaneous.

“Improvised work got a bit of a bad reputation because the audience fears that a musician will just show up on stage and have fun with whatever he feels like doing, disregarding audience engagement. I find that this is true of jazz in particular, where free form at times gets taken to an extreme and the audience is left wondering what on earth is going on.”

Spiteri assures me that this is definitely not the idea behind Tuesday’s concert. On the contrary, his idea is to have the audience completely engaged, with both himself and Agergaard having fun while delivering a dynamic performance.

“It’s all about the instant creation of the music. This is something that I’ve been wanting to do for a while. I naturally needed to find someone who was totally on my same wavelength, with whom I could communicate instantly and I did have a number of musicians in mind.”

In the end that someone turned out to be Agergaard, whose music Spiteri had been following for quite a while. Much to Spiteri’s enthusiasm, Agergaard professed immediate interest in the idea.

“He was on board pretty much from the get-go and this meant a lot to me. We both had been following each other’s music, but we had never actually played together. Thomas is very profound about the music, which means that I find it easy to discuss the technical aspects with him, whereas with some others it can be a bit more difficult.”

With Spiteri’s Mediterranean roots and Agergaard’s Nordic background, even the fusion of styles should prove to be a treat. Naturally, the concert should turn out to be a challenge for both musicians – in Spiteri’s words, solo improvisation is way easier than a collaboration, particularly given that both musicians have their own definite style.

“When you combine the creative process with someone else’s, there needs to be the right balance between the two. I was very sensitive to the choice because I also view this concert as a bit of an extension to my latest works, following on to Silence, Sound and Spaces.”

Spiteri says that he has embarked on a journey to keep his artistic expressions his own, with the least interferencepossible. The artistic elements on his Silence, Sound and Spaces CD, he continues, gave him a lot of artistic and spatial freedom, allowing him to be completely alone in a quiet environment.

“I really found myself. Collaborating with someone can affect this and this is why the identity of the collaborator took on so much importance. But Thomas can really sense the intimacy of the music; he appreciates that the space between the music itself is just as important as the notes...”

Neither Spiteri nor Agergaard want the performance to become a show of virtuosity, with music that is too technical. The two aim to create what Spiteri refers to as “beautiful textures, a tapestry of sounds”.

Agergaard will arrive in Malta a couple of days before the actual performance, so that the two can spend some sessions in the studio and see what develops from there. I have to admit that the idea of no rehearsals does sound rather alien.

“Of course, with improvisation the process is different. But no, we will not just show up on stage and start playing – we will be spending some time together to get into it. But the performance itself will be pretty spontaneous, I don’t think we are even going to plot set pieces and improvise on them.”

The performance will be a collective effort, with the musicians duetting. Given the contrast between Spiteri’s percussion instruments and Agergaard’s saxophone, the combination itself should turn out to be interesting. The saxophone, Spiteri explains, is more of a ‘linear’ instrument, playing notes as opposed to chords, with a texture that isn’t ‘busy’. Percussion instruments, on the other hand, are more complex, with the different instruments portraying a range of different sounds.

“This should result in a complementary contrast,” Spiteri says.

The concert is only one of a series of projects that Spiteri is currently working on. Fresh from performing Silence, Sound and Spaces across various countries in Europe, including the UK, Paris and Berlin, he plans to carry out more performances abroad later this year. In the meantime, he is busy with a school project in collaboration with Joe Friggieri, Inkontri.

“We took 20 poems and set them to music. Now we are taking it to schools. The teaching of poetry can be perceived as rather boring, but students have taken to this method. We started in October and plan to continue until March, in total performing some 60 times in all. We usually finish off with a Q&A that should take about 15 minutes – invariably, we end up taking about an hour because the students really get into it.”

Improvisations will take place on Tuesday at the Manoel Theatre at 8pm.

www.teatrumanoel.com.mt;

www.renzospiteri.com