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Symphony for William op 212 - Derek Bourgeois World Premiere Tennessee Tech Wind Orchestra Wednesday 13th October 2004 Will-o’-the-Wisp Dianthus Barbatus (Sweet William) Will Power It is now twenty-five years since I first commissioned a wind band piece. Planning in the late seventies for the First International Conference for Wind Band Composers, Conductors and Publishers which I hosted in Manchester, England, we included a major commission from a British composer, and from the list of possibilities, I selected Derek Bourgeois who had already written me a very successful overture for orchestra called Green Dragon, now arranged for wind band as opus 32a and published by Derek’s main publisher, Louis Martinuus of HaFaBra. Bourgeois has an extraordinary facility; his Symphony no 1 had nearly been selected for a BBC Prom when the composer was in his late teens, and it was followed by a constant flow of works, at first quite “modern” in style, though owing more to composers like Elgar, Walton, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, early Britten and Stravinsky, rather than the Second Viennese School or the denizens of Darmstadt. After Cambridge and a spell of school teaching, he settled in Bristol, took over the Sun Life Brass Band, discovered a new public who wanted more accessible music, and so, with relief, turned towards a more traditional style of composition. Will-o’-the-Wisp The first movement as the title suggests is a fleet scherzo, albeit with strong contrasts between scherzo material and a sombre choral-like passage which appears twice, once reflective at the end of the development, once angry as a codetta. An introductory twenty four bar theme careers erratically through the woodwind, starting in A minor and exploring various keys before ending a semitone higher on the dominant of Eb. Eb is the key of the main thematic material, all rushing chords and scales, a secondary theme moves through a series of triads and ushers in a C minor theme with a strong Spanish flavour. These relatively simple thematic ideas are the basis for a bewildering variety of contrapuntal ingenuities - inversions, augmentation, changed metres from the triple 3/8 to a duple 6/16. All seems plain sailing in the recapitulation until the mood moves seamlessly into an ostinato figure in an alla breve triple time passage, itself giving way to an aggressive 13/16 which climaxes on the final peroration of the chorale theme in triple forte. Dianthus Barbatus (Sweet William) After the rhythmic and harmonic tensions of the first movement, the mood is tranquil, the form a simple song, A-B-A-B, the first theme a lyrical twenty-eight bar (measure) melody for horn, chiefly in Eb, over a simple brass accompaniment. There is a short bridge passage into the second theme, ten bars on oboe over clarinets. In the repeat of this material the first theme is given to the woodwind choir, the second to euphonium under two solo clarinets. Will Power Moderato feroce is the opening indication, both of speed and prevalent mood. Is it the parallel harmonic movement which makes me think of Vaughan Williams in the 4th or 6th Symphonies? The mood is grim, the textures become sparse as he starts a canonic passage until a reprise of the opening gestures. The pulse is speeded up, as the triplet quaver becomes the crotchet beat in a headlong 4/4. There is a manic quality about this – Derek Bourgeois describes a similar passage as being music suitable for “Dick Barton – Special Agent”, a radio soap opera of my youth! Suddenly the rushing stops, a broad theme emerges, winding down to a coda of considerable pathos. The main commission at the Manchester Conference of 1981 was Derek Bourgeois' Symphony of Winds (1981, HaFaBra). His scoring here, as in his Sinfonietta (1983, R Smith) is brilliantly effective, but it has been suggested by American colleagues that the difficulties for players are not equalled by the intellectual demands. He views the Wind Band almost as an extension of the brass band, with massive doublings and a luxuriant palette. Bourgeois’ language is deliberately traditional, though the relative naivety of both works is seasoned with the unexpected harmonic or rhythmic twist. Perhaps his most popular piece so far, and easily the most economical, is the little Serenade (1982, R Smith) in 11/8, sometimes 13/8, an audience pleaser that is a metric teaser for players and conductors. A more recent work in this genre has a typical punning title Metro Gnome (HaFaBra 1999). The influences in his music are Tchaikovsky, Elgar, Ravel, Walton, Shostakovich and Britten, all assimilated into an extraordinarily fluent technical language which has consciously stepped away from attempting to vie with contemporary trends in the seventies and eighties into a far more popular lingua franca which owes much to the world of the brass band. Here virtuosity and sentiment go hand in had, and I find in some of the later works that this juxtaposition, which works for brass bands, jars when transcribed for wind orchestra. Among his other works are the traditional and rather sentimental Bridge over the River Cam (1989, G&M Brand), the very energetic Diversions (1987, Vanderbeek & Imrie) an attractive work which is sadly neglected; less inventive are a Concerto for Brass Sextet (1994, HaFaBra), and wind arrangements of the Trombone Concerto (1989, R Smith) and the Percussion Concerto, (1997, G & M Brand), written for Evelyn Glennie. In 1998 he contributed a moving Northern Lament (G&M Brand) to my birthday commissions for school band, just a little too hard for most schools perhaps, but again a work that could be very useful for a more experienced band. In 1981 his Blitz was the Test Piece for the National Brass Band Finals, and this marked the beginnings of a new wave of brass band composition, embracing contemporary techniques and introducing the conservative brass band aficionados to more progressive music. Many of these works have been transcribed for concert band, and these include Wind Blitz (HaFaBra) and Apocalypse (HaFaBra), both virtuosic and aggressive in style. In complete contrast are the salon works such as Molesworth’s Melody (2001, HaFaBra), while recently he has written several epic works, the 77 minute Symphony no 8, the Mountains of Mallorca, (2002, HaFaBra) and three works written in 2003, the Concerto for Alto Saxophone, the Double Concerto for Trumpet and Bass Trombone, and Mallorca: Symphonic Fantasy on Traditional Mallorquin Songs. His most recent work, Symphony for William, was written in six days in July as part of my personal commissioning project. After a time as Director of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, Bourgeois was for some years Director of Music at St. Paul's School for Girls, holding Holst's old post. Now in retirement in Mallorca he still retains his enthusiasm for the wind band, and his music is published by Ha-Fa-Bra. |