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INDEX

Programme for Gala Concert at Barbican, 24th October 2005

In Defence of the Wind Orchestra – an essay

Written for the programme for the 125th Anniversary Concert of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in the Barbican.

UNIQUE COLLABORATION WITH LSO, BBC & PHILHARMONIA

Greetings from London, UK. I am now over half way through my stay at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, one of the premier conservatories of the world. Situated next door to the Barbican Arts Centre at the heart of the City of London, the professorial links with the music profession are second to none. As well as the regular programme of orchestral and chamber activities, there is unique collaboration in the postgraduate orchestral training programme with the London Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony and Philharmonia Orchestras.

For information for graduate and undergraduate study look at Guildhall School of Music & Drama: Home

I have loved the surfeit of theatre, opera and concerts available in London. Wind Orchestra music is very much alive in professional, conservatoire and military circles as wind selections from my diary for September and October shows:

St. John’s Smith Square is a superb venue for wind, a generous acoustic but one that can encompass a wide range of dynamics and sonorities. An excellent audience attended the concert by Coldstream Guards which featured music by Martin Ellerby and Gordon Jacob, much of it available on two excellent CDs.

The following day at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama we played part of the Octet of Stravinsky, and then as background music to a wine party for postgraduates movements from the Mozart Gran Partitta, the Serenade in Bb in the Octet version, published now by Doblinger. More about the spelling and genesis of the versions of the Gran Partitta later this year.

To the Royal Academy of Music, (as Pepys used to say) where senior students gave stunning accounts of two major works from the twentieth century, due to be made available soon on commercial disc, under Head of Woodwind and conductor Keith Bragg of the Philharmonia. The elegant Duke’s Hall is a little small for the biggest massed sonorities of the Messiaen, but these were two carefully prepared performances which were given with commitment and passion. My only niggling caveat was that though they observed the 60 seconds silence between each movement of the Messiaen, these would have been more effective and theatrical had the ensemble frozen still.

The performances in the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, of the Serenades in C minor and Bb were given by members of Ensemble 360, a newly founded team of strings and wind based in Sheffield with a regular series of concerts planned throughout the coming year. This was wind playing of the highest order, flexible and stylish, played in the round with all of the ensemble acutely aware of the musical ideas of each other.

October 20th brought veteran flautist Trevor Wye to St John’s to celebrate his 70th birthday with Wib Bennett, Nicholas Daniel, Tony Pay and Joy Farrall. Much of the programme was of Victoriana, but the opening Telemann work with Rachel Brown on Baroque Flute was worth the journey alone, and the whole concert was an object lesson in supreme technical work at the service of consummate musicianship.

Our Guildhall concert at the Barbican on October 24 was a massive undertaking, five taxing works, each with problems for the players while providing a varied aural experience which even appealed to audience members inexperienced and suspicious of contemporary wind music. I felt that it provided too an educational opportunity for our top players; programme notes and an apologia for the wind orchestra are below!

MICHAEL BERKELEY

When I began to teach and conduct for Sir John Manduell at the Royal Northern College of Music about thirty years ago, I fell under the spell of the very civilised music of John’s teacher, Lennox Berkeley. It was thus natural that when I began first to commission works for the burgeoning wind ensemble in the eighties, I should turn early on to his son, Michael. In the eighties, Michael was far too busy, but he always held out hope. His recent retirement from the Cheltenham International Festival coincided with plans for me to conduct a concert at the Barbican to celebrate the 125th birthday of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Yet another of my almost annual letters letter winged its way to Michael’s home in deepest Wales, and to my delight he responded positively. Hence the gestation period for Slow Dawn has been a full quarter of a century.

Shooting Stars has taken only a decade to mature. In the late nineties, we celebrated the retirement of Sir John with a splendid all-day festival, and I invited various composers to contribute short fanfares. Michael responded with an energetic piece for wind ensemble called Hunt, and I immediately asked him to extend its length and scoring to make a wind ensemble work, but to no avail. However, I suspect that like many composers, when faced with a commission for a lyrical, gentle work, he was seduced by the potential brilliance of the wind ensemble, and the result is a pairing of these two strongly contrasted works, the one a poetic evocation of dawn, the other a brilliant jeu d’esprit which the composer originally entitled Dodgems. Apart from the initial idea, .the new title was my only contribution to two major additions to our repertoire.

INDEX

CRIES OF LONDON

This CD brings together five major works of Martin Ellerby, spanning the decade since the premiere of his first original wind work, Paris Sketches. They are given in first rate performances by the Regimental Band of the Coldstream Guards under the sensitive baton of Graham Jones and recorded by the experienced Michael Purton.

Paris, Spain, Venice and London are the sources of inspiration for four of these works. Paris Sketches of course is a familiar work on many programmes internationally, and it is now available in a new computer-set edition. Evocations draws on a variety of Spanish subjects for its inspiration, a painting by Miro for Harlequin’s Carnival, Cervantes’ great novel for the Death of Don Quixote, a gentle poem by Lorca for the lyrical Dream and finally Peter Shaffer’s brilliant play for The Royal Hunt of the Sun, the ritual dances of ancient Spain. It is good to be able to revisit the Clarinet Concerto which I first heard in the WASBE Conference in Luzern. Here the recording sorts out the balance problems sometimes found in the concert hall, and the work emerges as charming, thoroughly agreeable and well-crafted, naturally played here in a thoroughly idiomatic performance by the dedicatee, Linda Merrick.

Venetian Spells I commissioned for the BASBWE Conference in 1998 and I do not understand why it is not played more often. It has parts for harpsichord and harp which could probably be put onto a synthesizer, and like Paris Sketches this is really good light music, attractive melodic material with some nice harmonic twists.

The most recent addition to the repertoire is Cries of London, commissioned by and dedicated to the Band of HM Coldstream Guards and its conductor Graham Jones. For some time, Martin has been composer-in-residence, and this is a fine result, a work in six movements, some based on rounds and catches, some on the famous bells of Westminster, with a fine version of our National Anthem which re-introduces bugle calls from the first movement, played antiphonally and derived from the traditional bugle calls of the 2nd Battallion Regiment. The third movement, A Dream or Two (A Song for London) is deliberately and a little sentimentally “cast in the manner of a popular song”.

The disc is available from Specialist Recording Company

Next month I will give a brief review of the excellent CD by the same band, conductor and record company of music by Gordon Jacob.

INDEX

DISCOVERY OF THE MONTH

I was once given an award at the Chicago Mid-West International Band and Orchestra Clinic, and immediately following the award ceremony came a concert of some of the most innovative jazz I had heard, Paquito d’Rivera and his group, playing Latin American inspired charts with little witty asides drawn from classical repertoire, and amazing virtuosity. I thought at the time that someone needed to commission a wind work from him, and then I found his wind quintet, publication details below.

Paquito D’Rivera — Aires Tropicales

Currently in the repertoire of quintets worldwide, this exciting recital piece’s individual movements also work well for jobs and educational concerts. The seven movements are: Alborada, a slow introduction, Son with an ostinato Latin bass line, Habanera, similar to Ravel, Vals Venezolano, a lively Venezuelan waltz, Dizzyness, an homage to Dizzy Gillespie, Contredanza, an upbeat Cuban dance, and Afro, a rhythmic 6/8 dance over an African ostinato. Doubling on piccolo and English horn. “...Aires Tropicales was the concluding work and the most spectacularly successful.” 

The Washington Post 

………..AND ANOTHER WIND QUINTET

The wind quintet is not my favorite medium, I much prefer the octet, but along with Aires Tropicales I must recommend Vaudeville by Greg Danner, available from Greg at the email address below. This is a hilarious sort of hillybilly joke-telling piece, needing pretty extrovert players to tell the jokes and carry it off.

Greg Danner's Woodwind Quintet, Vaudeville, is published through Avanti (a company Greg runs himself). You can contact Greg at his email address here at Tennessee Technical University gdanner@tntech.edu

INDEX

WEBSITE OF THE MONTH

Having confessed to a slight antipathy towards wind quintets, I must also confess to loving double quintets, and my award of website-of-the-month must go to Cathy Gerhart who is developing an incredible resource of an annotated list of over 260 works for double wind quintet, with links to websites of composers, publishers and libraries. Check out:

http://faculty.washington.edu/gerhart/dwqbibliography/

Cathy Gerhart

Librarian

University of Washington Libraries

(206) 685-2827

INDEX

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GALA CONCERT TO CELEBRATE THE 125th BIRTHDAY OF THE GUILDHALL SCHOOL OF MUSIC & DRAMA

Guildhall School of Music & Drama

Symphonic Wind Ensemble

Monday 24 October 2005

Barbican Hall, London

And also at the RNCM International Wind Festival

Sunday 6 November 2005

Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester

Programme

In Defence of the Wind Orchestra – an essay

For programme notes, point browser to title.

INDEX

In Defence of The Wind Orchestra

Tim Reynish

… the more we encourage composers to use the wind ensemble, the better it's going to be, particularly with the generation of wind players that’s out there now

Sir Simon Rattle

Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz, Dvorák, Schoenberg, Strauss, Grainger, Holst, Vaughan Williams, Hindemith, Stravinsky and Messiaen all wrote for it, as have Bennett, Berio, Birtwistle, Corigliano, Henze, Harbison, Knussen, Lindberg, MacMillan, Matthews, Maxwell Davies, Maw, Musgrave, Penderecki, Rands, Rautavaara, Rouse, Sallinen, Schulhoff, Skalkottas, Tippett and many others. 

Rattle, Tilson Thomas, Rozhdestvensky and Slatkin conduct it so why is wind ensemble music virtually absent from the airwaves and our record stores at a time when there is more excellent repertoire available in professional recordings than ever before?

There is undoubtedly an element of snobbery involved; the older generation suffered wind band on the military parade ground, the younger know it from the leaden formulas of the school rehearsal hall, and many of us associate the genre with the razzmatazz of the American Football half-time show, the circus band or the street parade. The attitude of the music business is largely coloured by perceptions derived from these experiences, but at a time when “the profession” is worried about ageing patrons and falling audiences, here is a musical sub-culture, viewed by most as something below rock, heavy metal, rap, jazz and folk, with the potential to explode into our musical consciousness, in the same way that the authentic performance practice of early music did in the latter part of the twentieth century.

A Living Culture

The former Chairman of the Music Panel of the Arts Council of England, Gavin Henderson, made a speech some time ago about the loss of the sense of a living culture, of people being directly engaged in music and indeed music for their time. Today's wind repertoire is more representative of a living culture than that of many other ensembles and minority interests; the wind band is a sleeping musical giant, gradually awakening. Last year, despite the continuing crisis in musical education, hundreds of thousands of wind, brass and percussion players took part in public examinations. Many of them will join wind orchestras, semi-professional and amateur, all playing a repertoire which did not exist twenty years ago, most of it in print and on sale, but with opinions on this repertoire fuelled largely by ignorance and prejudice, who will take it seriously?

WIND RENAISSANCE

It is easy to be snobbish - I was until 1981 when an American-led International Conference in Manchester, followed by a study tour of the USA as a Winston Churchill Fellow, led me to the discovery of this exciting new soundworld, and I saw its potential as far beyond a utility vehicle for ceremonial, entertainment or education. I knew something of the creation of the "modern" wind band by Holst and Vaughan Williams in the early twentieth century, but very little of the minor revolution effected by the late Frederick Fennell, who created the Eastman Wind Ensemble in 1952. He gave new standards of performance which are still a yardstick today, and provided the contemporary composer with the chance of writing for the band as an ensemble of solo players, one to a part. Since 1952, there has been a gradual growth of exciting repertoire for the wind ensemble by major composers, and the wind orchestra has come into the concert hall at last.

In 1983, I placed the first of over sixty commissions for the Royal Northern College of Music Wind Orchestra and BASBWE, the British Association of Symphonic Bands & Wind Ensembles. It was Guy Woolfenden's Gallimaufry, drawn from his music for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Self-published and promoted, in sixteen years already well over 2,000 scores and sets of parts have been sold, and over 6,000 performances given world wide, with his Illyrian Dances equally popular. Robert Maycock wrote of it in The Independent:

In so far as music criticism deals seriously with radio at all, it tends to concentrate on Radio 3, such are the cultural blinkers most critics wear. At the least, this means that good things on the other networks get missed - such as the Royal Northern College of Music Wind Orchestra playing Guy Woolfenden last Friday, again on Radio 2. If you're in the new-music business and smirking, ask yourself if typecasting someone as a theatre composer isn't another case of cultural blinkers¼¼. A piece like Gallimaufry, with its witty ingenuities, expert layout, and a tune that stays with you as long as Carousel's, has helped thousands of players to cut their musical teeth and stirred thousands more with the adventure of living music. Yet how many contemporary" specialists have heard a note of it?

“ART” MUSIC FOR WIND

At the "serious" end of the market, conductors are gradually beginning to realise the potential of this very new medium. Michael Tilson Thomas has conducted John Harle in the Dahl Saxophone Concerto, and commissioned Colin Matthews' "heavy metal" Quatrain to tour with the LSO, Rozhdestvensky has recorded a disc of Russian wind music, Leonard Slatkin conducted Nicholas Maw's American Games in Washington with the US Marines (surely the Vienna Philharmonic of the wind world) and plans to conduct the new Corigliano Third Symphony, Circus Maximus in Spring 2006. Sir Simon Rattle recorded Percy Grainger's Lincolnshire Posy with the CBSO, and commissioned Gran Duo from Magnus Lindberg; he played the Lindberg and a commission for wind and double basses from Heiner Goebbels in his first season with the Berlin Philharmonic.

In a recent interview Leonard Slatkin articulated the growing excitement about the new repertoire:

What I think you are finding is that more composers are using the orchestral venue to experiment and use different frameworks. So, some of the works that are emerging for wind ensemble are designed not only for use with band but for use within an orchestral concert where you might not require the strings.

Although there is now a vast library of good, often great, wind music published and recorded, it rarely finds its way into programmes, where the tried and tested hold sway. Sir Michael Tippett was well aware of the dangers of routine taste when he wrote:

We all know that the big public is extremely conservative and is willing to ring the changes on a few beloved works till the end of time, and that our concert life, through the taste of this public, suffers from a kind of inertia of sensibility, that seems to want no musical experience whatever beyond what it already knows.....Surely the matter is that the very big public masses together in a kind of dead passion of mediocrity, and that this blanket of mediocrity is deeply offended by any living passion of the unusual, the rare, the rich, the exuberant, the heroic and the aristocratic in art.

The "few beloved works" syndrome is omnipresent in our concert halls and on the air. There are more than twenty-five recordings of the Haydn Trumpet Concerto in the catalogue today, yet how many of the world's leading trumpeters, let alone their audience or indeed their students, know of the Trumpet Concerto of Richard Rodney Bennett of which Paul Driver wrote when he inhabits this sort of crossover territory, Bennett really has something to say.

This is one of three works by Bennett, written for the Royal Northern College of Music; brilliant scoring with novel combinations of colours make these and other wind commissions by composers such as Bedford, Casken, MacMillan, Musgrave and Sallinen, a natural bridge between the so-called "serious" composer and the public. So here we are with a marvellous medium and great new British pieces for professionals and amateurs; now we need more exposure on the airwaves and in the press to spread the word.

TONIGHT’S PROGRAMME

Tonight’s programme is designed to feature the virtuosity of the young performers at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, beginning and ending with two masterpieces of orchestral wind ensemble music. Tippett’s dazzling Mosaic is a kaleidoscope of miniature concerti for nine groups, each maintaining its own separate identity. In Magnus Lindberg’s Gran Duo, wind and brass thematic gestures are characterised traditionally, nervous high “feminine” chatterings from the woodwind, strong “male” chorales from the brass but gradually these dual personalities develop and absorb each other’s characteristics. Both works have carefully defined speed relationships similar to those in Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments.

CONCERTOS

A number of fine concertos with wind accompaniment have been created in the past couple of decades; from the vast repertoire of contemporary American music we have chosen David Kechley's concerto for Alto Saxophone, Restless Birds before the Dark Moon, commissioned by the United States Military Academy Band.

While in Manchester at the Royal Northern College of Music, I commissioned two concertos for Evelyn Glennie, both with a programme linked to the four seasons, Thea Musgrave’s atmospheric Journey through a Japanese Landscape and tonight’s work, Elements by Adam Gorb, receiving its London première.

Unfortunately Sir Harrison Birtwistle was forced to postpone the promised piece for tonight’s performance, but we are very fortunate to be able to première two works by Michael Berkeley. I first contacted Michael in the early eighties about a commission, I have written almost annually and increased the pressure when he retired from running the Cheltenham International Music Festival. At first we envisaged a gentle lyrical work, Slow Dawn, and this is part of an ongoing series of commissions from my wife and I in memory of our third son William. In the event, as with so many composers, he was seduced by the excitement of the medium into writing a companion piece of great energy, Shooting Stars.

Most of the programme is being repeated at the RNCM International Wind Festival on November 6th; in addition we will premiere Vranjanka by Kenneth Hesketh, another work in the current series of commissions placed by my wife and myself of Gebrauchsmusik, designed to be performed by amateur and school ensembles.

PROGRAMME NOTES

Sir Michael Tippett - Mosaic

1905 -1998

Mosaic is the title given by Sir Michael to the first movement of the Concerto for Orchestra, when played as a wind ensemble piece. The Concerto was commissioned by the Edinburgh International Festival, written in 1963, dedicated To Benjamin Britten with affection and admiration in the year of his 50th birthday and premièred at the Festival by the LSO conducted by Colin Davis. The first movement is for wind, brass and percussion, the second for a small string orchestra and all are utilised in the finale. Throughout the work, the players are treated as soloists, and appear in a variety of contertante groupings, emphasised by their placings in the score and on the platform.

The first movement is a dazzling display of compositional technique. Tippett states no less than nine fully worked out themes, characterised by Ian Kemp as being in three groups, first creating lyricism (two flutes and harp, tuba and piano, three horns), the second, rhetoric (timpani and piano, a reed band of oboe, english horn, double bassoon and contrabassoon, and two trombones with percussion interjections) and the third, speed, (piano and xylophone, clarinet and bass clarinet, and two trumpets and piano). This latter group of themes is half as fast again as the first and second.

There is no development of the material, but the themes appear in combination with each other, overlapping, interrupting. Within the themes are contrapuntal ingenuities, the clarinets are frequently in inverse canon, the piano and xylophone imitate a quaver apart, but constantly shift the accentuation and the pitch imitation. Further complications arise from the juxtaposition of the third elements with their constant speed of 144 over the lyric and rhetorical at 96; Ian Kemp writes of Tippett's purpose: to write a movement in which dramatic conflict is replaced by its opposite, a kind of relaxed enchantment where events seem to mark time and yet where everything is still rich and weighty enough to warrant single-minded attention, or to warrant the cardinal status traditionally accorded the first movement of a concerto.

Programme

Michael Berkeley - Shooting Stars

b. 1948 (London only)

Shooting Stars is a complete re-write of a short piece called Hunt that I wrote for Tim Reynish and Sir John Manduell some ten years ago. I initially thought of calling it Dodgems since it has a feel of the fair ground, of bright lights and of being jostled. Near the end there is even that empty sensation of putting your foot down in a dodgem and finding the power has been momentarily cut off by all the pushing and shoving. I also recall childhood days in the shooting gallery when the targets where placed at the centre of a star. However as I was working on the music I witnessed the brief spark and flash of a shooting star flying across the night sky and, since this short piece for symphonic wind can act as a prelude to the more substantial Slow Dawn, I opted for the ambiguous, though related, title.

Michael Berkeley - Slow Dawn

b. 1948

Timothy Reynish has been asking me to write for Wind Band for a quarter of a century and Slow Dawn, which is dedicated to the memory of his son, William, is, finally, the result. It depicts the gradual appearance of the sun (in the form of the tuba) as it climbs into the sky. Shafts of light and playful reflections accompany the increasing warmth of day. Although in this hemisphere we have tended to think of, as Wilfred Owen put it, 'the kind old sun', the music of midday in this piece suggests more the savage anger of heat in foreign climes with stabbing beams of light. Though the sun winds down as ever, it is its endless power that informs the music's closing bars.

© 2005 Michael Berkeley

reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press

Programme

Kenneth Hesketh - Vranjanka

b. 1968 (Manchester only)

Vranjanka (the title means "From Vranje," a town in southern Serbia, pronounced VRAHN-yahn-kah ) is loosely based on the traditional folksong Šano Dušo. The melody exists in two versions, one in 7/8 and one in 3/4. I have chosen the version in 7/8 and in doing so, have extended the melodic ideas of the original with new material.

The musical form of the piece is as follows: a fairly slow introductory section where the theme is only hinted at but never heard and a faster second section cast in a set of variations on the folksong. These are not variations in the traditional sense, with clearly marked beginnings and endings, but ongoing developments of the various melodic material in the folksong with original material 'growing out' along side.

The text for Vranjanka influenced the composition more often than not at an unconscious level, but it is included here for reference:

Sana, my soul, opens the door to me,

Open the door to me and I will give you coins.

My heart is burning for you, Sana.

Your fair face, Sana, is snow from the mountains,

Your forehead, Sana, is like moonlight.

That mouth of yours, Sana, like a deep red sunset,

That eye, my darling, makes me burn.

When night comes, marvellous Sana, I twist in sadness,

Your beauty, Sana, will not let me sleep.

Programme

David Kechley - Restless Birds before the Dark Moon

b. 1947

Restless Birds before the Dark Moon was commissioned by the United States Military Academy Band and premièred by alto saxophone soloist Staff Sergeant Wayne Tyce at the World Saxophone Congress in Montreal, July 7, 2000. As the title suggests, the mood ranges from foreboding to frenetic. Despite its extremely energetic opening there is also an underlying lyricism throughout much of the work. This lyricism comes to full fruition at the close of the middle section with the saxophone soaring above a darkly coloured brass chorale. The composer employs both modal and chromatic materials with equal force and often presents the same idea transformed from one of these poles to the other. Although the opening passages are modal they are soon interrupted by sharp and sudden chromatic interjections which turn into sustained and sweeping descending harmonies in the middle section. The interjections return again in original form near the end of the piece just before a final burst of energy, which pits the soloist against the entire ensemble in rapid-fire unison.

Since the première of Second Composition for Large Orchestra by the Seattle Symphony in 1968, Kechley’s work has been commissioned and performed throughout North America, Europe and elsewhere. Performers include Minnesota, Cleveland, Boston Pops, Seattle Symphony, Colorado Symphony and St Paul’s Chamber Orchestras, and the Kronos and Lark Quartets. He has written a considerable amount of solo and chamber music for saxophone, and his works have been awarded numerous prizes and grants. He was born in Seattle, studied at the University of Washington and the Cleveland Institute of Music, and is at present Professor of Music at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Programme

Adam Gorb - Elements

b. 1958

Suite for Percussion and Wind Ensemble

Earth – Allegro moderato

Water – Andante

Fire – Prestissimo

Air – Largo – Presto

The origins of the four elements: Earth, Water, Fire and Air date back to the Greek philosopher, physician, poet and high priest Empedocles (c. 490 – 430 BC) who allegedly committed suicide by throwing himself into the crater of Mount Etna. Empedocles analysed the universe into four elements forming the basis of matter. His system is founded on the theory together with another, which supposes two opposing forces, Love and Strife. The world began when the elements, which had been torn asunder by the forces of Strife, tended to come together again under the influence of Love. The different species arose out of the different mingling of the elements.

In this work I have drawn upon different motifs from that great elemental epic: Wagner’s ‘Der Ring Des Nibelungen.’ While there is little direct quotation I have been inspired by the extraordinarily forward-looking harmony and the magical sense of atmosphere found in Wagner’s great masterpiece. The first movement: Earth begins with ominous rumblings for the soloist, which soon erupt into a mood of intense fury. The harmonic language is harsh in the extreme, the rhythms are angular, and the texture is dominated by drums of various timbres, with an occasional grotesque interjection from the xylophone. At the climax of the movement any sense of order is lost and the players in the band play independently of the conductor, over whom the soloist improvises. Things eventually calm down, and the second movement, Water begins with an extended saxophone duet over murky chromatic semiquavers for wind and brass. Through this movement I have attempted to guide the emotional direction from Strife towards Love. The dominant instrument here is the marimba, which plays rhapsodically around fluid woodwind solos, like a deep-sea diver travelling amongst various strange tropical fish. Twice in the course of the movement a brass chorale (with melodic contours from Wagner’s Rhine maidens) cuts through the texture, leading in its second appearance to the tonal centre of A major before the saxophones are heard once again.

With the sound of a match being struck Fire steals in, at first with a flicker, but soon gathering momentum and becoming wild and uncontrolled. The soloist switches from marimba to various metal percussion instruments, including thunder sheet and junk metal. At the climax of the movement a joyful bell-like theme is heard in the horns before the fire quickly burns itself out. The final movement Air expands this bell-like melody in music that is very slow, very quiet and very simple with silence an important factor. The dominant sound now is the cool, calm timbre of the vibraphone, and a great peace descends upon the scene. There is a final statement of the bell-like theme in the full band before the piece evaporates in a quicksilver A major codetta.

Programme

Magnus Lindberg - Gran Duo

b.1958

Gran Duo is a dialogue between the two orchestral families of woodwind and brass, each with their respective material. Their initial characters, equating to the poetic stereotypes of “masculine” and “feminine”, become progressively blurred and androgynised during the course of the work as larger sound masses give way to chamber music-style sub-groupings and individual instrumental solos.

As regards scoring the composer has stated that “if no-one is playing, nothing is heard”, so the illusion of sustained sound has to be created without recourse to strings. Similarly, clear attack and accentuation have to be carefully sculpted, as there is no percussion to help articulation .

The scoring for orchestral wind and brass is identical to that of Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments apart from the addition of a bass clarinet. The critic Richard Whitehouse wrote after the first performance:

The five sections of the Lindberg play continuously for some 19 minutes, traversing a cycle of “characters” that mutate into each other with evident organic logic. Musical types vary from passages of intensive motivic writing to others of purely timbral impact; the whole contained within a harmonic framework, and with a culminating chorale sequence of Sibelian plangency.

After studying at the Sibelius Academy in Finland, Magnus Lindberg studied privately with Grisey and Globokar in Paris and with Donatoni in Siena and Ferneyhough in Damstadt. The style in his early works was indebted to serialism, heavily influenced by composers such as Stockhausen and Milton Babbitt, though more recently he has moved towards the differing sound worlds of Berio, Stravinsky, rock and ethnic music. In the mid-eighties his punk-inspired work Kraft brought him to international prominence, and this reputation was confirmed in the nineties with a series of major commissions. He has said of his music:

It is not about making a manifesto – otherwise I’d write it down on paper – I don’t have a political or social point to make.

Music is something which is about emotion. It is an experience.

Further listening:

MAGNUS LINDBERG

Clarinet Concerto – Gran Duo – Chorale

Kari Kriikku/Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Sakari Oramo

Ondine ODE 1038-2 - New release

University of Kentucky Wind Ensemble/Timothy Reynish

Mark Custom records 5342-MCD

ELEMENTS

Simone Rebello/RNCM Wind Orchestra/Timothy Reynish

THREE RECORDINGS BY THE

GUILDHALL SCHOOL OF MUSIC AND DRAMA

SYMPHONIC WIND ENSEMBLE

Conductor PETER GANE

Polyphonic QPRM 127D

Mark Custom Records 4739-MCD

Mark Custom Records 4830-MCD

Tim Reynish conducts the RNCM Wind Orchestra

Volume 1 Mark Custom Records 4949-MCD

UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY WIND ENSEMBLE

Conducted by Tim Reynish

Websites: