A fascinating concert, perhaps the most interesting and enterprising brass collection I have yet encountered, in a growing repertoire which I hope will encourage more live performances of such music. I recently attended a concert by the LSO brass in the Barbican in which they played a programme of Copland, Ives, Bernstein and Gabrieli which was highly stimulating and which included the richly sonorous Barber Mutations from Bach. This begins with the chorale Christe du Lamm Gottes, first as harmonized by Joachim Decker (c. 1604) and then followed by Bach's two versions, one from a cantata, the other from the Orgelbuchlein. But Barber brings his own personality to bear on the music and the result is highly individual. The concertante Chorale by Roy Harris for organ and brass follows on mellifluously after this but is perhaps a shade overlong, yet Virgil Thomson's five-movement Family Portrait is characteristically quirky, and all four Cowell pieces are highly rewarding. The Grinnell Fanfare is unexpectedly catchy, and the Tall Tale (for brass sextet) with its cheerful interplay is capped by the vibrant Rondo which has the kind of florid extravagance that makes Janacek's brass writing so striking. Philip Glass's Sextet is an early postgraduate work, which he has apparently disowned. Its ''Hymn'' and ''Ballad'' sound old-fashioned in a consonant kind of way and even the touch of jazz in the finale is by no means avant-garde. But, if simplistic, this is real music and it has a certain charm.
Carl Ruggles's muted brass Angels, however, is unexpectedly pungent in its intensity, and far from angelic in the sinister implications of its compressed dissonance, yet the score is marked ''Serene''. Elliott Carter's arrangement of Purcell is quite haunting, with its repeated, tolling, bell-like note sounding throughout. The concert opens and closes with that great American original, Charles Ives. The title piece, From the steeples and the mountains, is scored for four sets of bells, trumpet and (here) trombones and the composer never heard it performed. Its effect is characteristically wild, with the polytonality simulating and extending the clangorous confusion of bell changes when completely disordered. Ives wrote on the score exultantly: ''From the Steeples—the Bells—then the Rocks on the Mountains begin to shout!'' The disc ends with the resplendent Let there be Light, and one can understand why the New York Central Presbyterian Church Choir, to whom it was dedicated (in 1901), found the composer's visonary musical excursions not quite comfortable. Performances throughout are first-rate, and the very realistic recording, made in All Hallows, Gospel Oak has just the right degree of resonance; it is splendidly balanced.'