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Sound
the Bells! American Premieres for
Brass -- Never owned a brass
ensemble disc before? This is a
great place to
start
The Bay Brass/ Guest Artists/
Alasdair Neale, Michael Tilson
Thomas, Robert Ward, Jeffrey
Budin, Bruce Broughton, Paul
Welcome & Charles Floyd,
conductors
Harmonia mundi multichannel
SACD
featured in Audiophile
Audition
by Steven Ritter
June, 2011
The
San Francisco based Bay Brass is
an ensemble consisting of players
drawn from the city's symphony
orchestra, ballet, and opera
organizations, numbering 13 in
all and acting as a true
cooperative group, sharing parts,
conducting, arranging, and even
compositional activities. This
disc features a series of works
premiered here by the ensemble,
and conducted--as noted in the
heading--by a number of
conductors, often in their own
music.
The
John Williams pieces are just
what you would expect from the
composer--three short vignettes
created for differing occasions,
all connected to the city of
Boston and its singular events,
each quite short, attractive,
melodic, and catchy. Williams
will certainly go down as one of
the finest composers, period, one
day -- regardless of genre, and
these little pieces give an
inkling as to why.
The
Tilson Thomas piece is a major
one, composed initially for the
Empire Brass Quintet under the
auspices of Rolf Smedvig, and
then later expanded to 12 members
for the brass of the London
Symphony Orchestra in 1996,
premiered in the U.S. the next
year by the Bay Brass. The work
is a marvel, and having heard
only a few compositions by the
composer/conductor, I was
unprepared for its quality. As
you might expect, Copland and
Bernstein figure prominently,
though Thomas offers his own
unique take on jazz, blues, and
open Americana, presenting us
with a stellar piece of great
imagination and no little degree
of exquisite beauty. This one is
a real winner in my
book.
Morten
Lauridsen is best known--perhaps
only known--as a very effective
composer of choral music. His
O Magnum Mysterium is
quite well-known and beautiful,
the brass arrangement here being
affecting, but not quite as much
as choral original. The
Fanfare for Brass Sextet
is short and interesting, but not
really significant in terms of
the overall content of this
recital.
Elegy
for Brass by Kevin Puts -- an
up-and-coming and in-demand young
composer -- gives us a heartfelt
and deeply moving piece created
in honor of the memory of Dr.
Stanton Schwartz, a great
supporter of the California
Orchestra, where the composer was
Composer-in-Residence from
1996-99. Spirals is a
multi-metered whirligig of a work
by Scott Hiltzik, an eclectic
composer and educator whose piece
was premiered by these forces in
2005.
The
most significant piece on this
disc is probably also the
longest: Fanfares, Marches,
Hymns & Finale by Bruce
Broughton, a widely-played
composer in many mediums, notably
the film industry, and who might
be remembered by a certain
generation for his superb and
highly-idiomatic score to the
movie Silverado. This piece is
what he calls "self-referential"
in that the titles are reflected
about the music instead of
defining what the music is. No
matter--each of the four
movements is a real cracker,
beautifully realized and very
significant in terms of
complexity and overall effect. I
cannot imagine this not becoming
a self-referential composition
for the brass ensemble, a
standard in the making, composed
in 2002.
Audio
Engineer Shawn Murphy's surround
sound on this album is
exemplary--fully charged through
each speaker, and gloriously
capturing the corporate and
individual characteristics of
each instrument, recorded at
Skywalker Sound. The performances
simply cannot be imagined any
better, no matter who might
attempt them.
--
Steven Ritter
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