2003 WASBE Conference

The opinions expressed
herein are those of the
authors and not
necessarily the opinions
of WASBE.

National Youth Wind Ensemble of Great Britain

Concert Review by Timothy Reynish

For me, one exciting facet of the 2003 WASBE Conference was the sound of experienced composers dealing with programmatic music based on great events, great philosophical theories, great sister arts, and the emotional stuff of life. Del Tredici was inspired by the clash of East and West in wartime, Karel Husa by the paintings of the Fauvists, Thorstein Wölmann by the paintings of Paul Klee, Fumio Tamura by a Tchekhov novel, Thomas Doss by the legend of Aurora, and Adam Gorb by the journey “Towards Nirvana”. Adam quotes the Buddha on death: “A flame that has been blown out. The flame does not go anywhere. Where would it have been before it was here and where would it go next?”

The opening inhabits the restless energized world of this composer's Metropolis. Adam describes this section as typifying man's striving for pleasure and gratification. Thus, the music is in constant motion with jazzy riffs, clashing tonalities, and constant metrical changes under syncopations. It comes to a rest on a series of chorale-like chords, harsh and uncompromising, and then sinks into a strange organum-like passage for a pair of off-stage saxophones, impersonating Tibetan horns. Little calls on oboe and flute are answered by muted brass in wonderfully fresh open scoring. Then follows a long, beautiful coda with ceremonial gongs, bird-calls, and the serenity of those great mountain ranges. This is music of great beauty and restraint. A distinguished colleague heard a performance in Chicago, in which most of the music was drowned by the air-conditioning, and commented that it was too long and too quiet. Surely however, the journey towards Nirvana and the contemplation of Death has no quick fix, no instant solutions. We still have a long way to go before any of our composers attempt the stillness of Das Lied von der Erde, but here Gorb reminds us of that wonderful tranquility. Again, as so often in the conference, there were many seconds before the audience erupted after yet another substantial, twenty-minute work.

The young students of the National Youth Wind Ensemble must have relished this big city music with its incredible rhythmic challenges—music that is as technically and intellectually challenging as the science, linguistics and computers that they face every day in the classroom. Phillip Scott is an expert trainer and a brilliant conductor. His performance of Michael Ball's Omaggio in the BBC Proms with this young orchestra was absolutely outstanding. His players here again had been trained to the ultimate degree.

As with so much of the conference, I felt that the acoustics of the hall had been poorly assessed. Early in the performance the music was unremittingly loud and noisy, and as a result I am sure that some of the detail got lost. With brass and percussion playing that enthusiastically, it is impossible to hear the woodwinds, so we do in fact lose a lot of excitement and colour. There is a tenseness in the direction of this ensemble that results in a slightly heavy approach, however, their skills put this conductor and young players, for me, in the same league as the Stockholm Wind Symphony with Christian Lindberg and Guildhall Symphonic Wind Ensemble with Peter Gane—incredibly virtuosic and brilliant...and loud. It seemed to me that other more mature groups and conductors were better able to pace the music.

At the risk of being pedantic and boring, it is worth recalling a few comments by Wayne Rapier, Erich Leinsdorf and others. Wayne, in a session on Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, said that he would listen to rehearsals, wondering why the orchestra was so great. He came to the conclusion that one reason was that in any concert there would be one or two really big climaxes, two Hohe-Punkte as Mahler put it, with the rest of the loud music architecturally fitting in to highlight those points.

Bruno Walter put it differently, when he warned against our being obsessed with little episodes at the expense of the architecture: “...It was my nature to fall in love with every beautiful detail of a composition and try to reproduce them with all of the intensity of expression of which I was capable, and thus neglect the synthesis and unity of conception which are the main points of an authentic interpretation. My enthusiasm for details was stronger than my capacity for subsuming them under a higher order.”

Finally, on the matter of balance, which is a more pressing consideration with the wind band than with the Symphony Orchestra, Leinsdorf wrote in The Composer's Advocate: “There is one fundamental physical law that bears repetition, since so many musicians are unaware of it; a sustained note is always stronger than a moving voice.... There is so much to be decided by the conductor who cares for a balanced performance that no amount of detail can possibly cover the permutations presented by such considerations as types of instruments (and players), size and acoustic of hall, seating arrangements, types of scoring.…”