REVIEW: Springfield Chamber Players, Sonic Pulse

Springfield Chamber Players, Springfield, MA
https://www.springfieldsymphonymusicians.com/
November 23, 2025
by Michael J. Moran

Never has a more diverse array of percussion instruments likely filled the stage of 52 Sumner, this ensemble’s home, than at today’s concert. The afternoon’s four performers, led by Nathan Lassell, Springfield Symphony Orchestra Principal Percussionist, have equally diverse backgrounds. While all teach and play in orchestras, their musical experience ranges from jazz and film to video games. 

The seven pieces on their program showcased the surprisingly wide variety of the percussion repertoire. The concert began with James Romig’s 2003 composition “The Frame Problem,” in which a trio plays a theme in different meters and at shifting dynamic levels on woods, metals, and drums as solos, duets, and a closing trio. The title suggests that artificial intelligence cannot grasp, or “frame,” this theme a

Photo by Angela Park

s accurately as the human mind. Lassell, Doug Perry, and David West played it with color and verve.

Lassell next soloed on Eric Guinavan’s 2020 “Hypernova,” with a small kit of vibratone, gongs, and drums, plus electronic playback, capturing the title’s reference to a stellar explosion in outer space with eerie, explosive energy. The full foursome followed with a rambunctious take on Clark Hubbard’s 2024 “Stardust” for two vibraphonists and two drummers, which Hubbard calls “a blend of rock, metal, funk” and which for Lassell evokes the band Metallica.

Perry then fashioned an alternately delicate and rollicking vibraphone improvisation, backed with imagination by Lassell on an assortment of smaller instruments. Axel Clarke’s trio “Roe-Sham-Beau” is based on a West African rhythm, which, in Lassell’s words and in his animated reading with West and Makana Medeiros on woods, drums, and vibraphones, made for “a cool conversation.”

For the last two pieces, the performers moved off stage directly in front of the audience. The dramatic high point of the program was a virtuosic rendition by Medeiros on bongo drum and French-language vocals of Georges Aperghis’ riveting 1978 theatrical monologue “Le Corps a Corps” (“Body to Body”).

The joyful closing number was a “Kpanlogo,” a traditional Ghanaian dance rhythm, featuring the quartet playing exuberantly on barrel drums, an energized audience singing along, and one brave concertgoer joining the ensemble, at West’s invitation, on a fifth drum, blending right in.  

The success of this stunning concert, heard in warm and clear acoustics, was perhaps most evident in the record number of engaged attendees who lingered to speak with the accessible musicians afterwards.