Telarc may well have spoiled us forever with their exceptional recordings of this marvellous band. CBS miss something of the bloom, the ripeness and range of the sonorities with their tighter and drier imaging. But it's a harsh comparison on which to start and I wouldn't want to discourage you from investigating an unusually intriguing programme. There is, of course, no better wind band curtain-raiser than Vaughan Williams's Toccata marziale, a classic of its kind, despatched here with all due regimental swagger, but I have returned already to Donald Hunsberger's expanded scoring of the richly inventive Variations for brass band. Here's a piece from Vaughan Williams's 'autumn' years, boldly harmonized and dark hued, bearing something of Percy Grainger's celtic bleakness in its moments of solitude. The low brasses are generously accommodated (and tellingly supported here by string bass and harp), there are piccolo trumpets and flugelhorns, indeed the whole gamut of possibility on offer from the contemporary Ameican wind band. This is a beautifully made scoring from one who plainly knows his forces from the inside.
Rather less successful, indeed somewhat pointless to my mind, is Hunsberger's reworking of Copland's Quiet city where, let's face it, the whole essence of the piece lies in its striking aural image of two lonely figures (trumpet and cor anglais) standing out against an urban nightscape of strings. Substitute the strings for wind and you're left with a generalization of texture and colour that serves only to absorb the solo voices—even one as distinctively idiomatic as Wynton Marsalis ''guest soloist''. But Copland, it seems, gave the arrangement his seal of approval. So who am I to argue.
For the rest, we've the baby brother of Hindemith's Symphony for concert band—his earlier Konzertmusik for wind: an edgy, slightly sinister mix of poker-faced military gestures and an almost enforced Weillian jazziness shot through with Hindemith's dry, characteristically academic counterpoints. Each to his own. Karel Husa's Music for Prague 1968 is essentially a dramatic colour piece, a cry from the heart for a lost homeland, full of obvious Nationalistic symbols: a recurrent bird-call (symbol of liberty), an old Hussite war-song (symbol of resistance), feverish climaxes built upon fanfares of distress, bells of alarm and victory remembered from the ancient Czech capital's countless church towers. What counts here is impact, visceral impact, and Husa's musical engineering is entirely geared to just that.
ES