With George Lloyd’s music featuring as one of the central threads of this year’s event, Leyland opened their concert with the work the composer felt to be his best for the brass band medium – ‘Diversions on a Bass Theme’.

In a performance that captured the energy and driving sense of propulsion, Michael Bach’s now familiar brand of heart on sleeve intensity also ensured that the score’s more lyrical moments were no less telling.    

Uphill

Although appearing as part of Exit Brass on the weekend, Glenn Van Looy and Stan Nieuwenhuis are also regular collaborators.

The Euphonium Concerto ‘Uphill’ was inspired by the inspirational, yet ultimately tragic story of Somalian athlete Samia Yusuf Omar, who died in search of her goal of competing at the 2012 Olympic Games.

From an opening rich in textural effect and kaleidoscopic colours, the Concerto didn’t quite live up to its initial promise, with a predictable, rock rhythm driven final movement offsetting the more innovative ideas of the first two sections. 

Despite this, Glenn Van Looy’s playing carried the performance along with stunning technical clarity and magnificent lyrical control, although the listener was still left with the impression that the creative talents of the composer will no doubt continue to be refined as his music finds an increasing audience.      

Magical

The encore however was piece of magical music making – from both soloist and composer Paul McGhee.

His dark, disturbingly beautiful version of ‘Abide with Me’ sent a palpable shiver down the spine with its twilight sense of ghostly atmosphere.

This was haunting musicality, underpinned by a funereal accompaniment of rhythmically offset bass drum and yearning glissandi which gave the simple treatment of the melodic line a feeling of other worldliness.

Contrast

The contrast with Edmund Rubbra’s ‘Variations on The Shining River’ was stark -  with a work which remains something of a curiosity of brass band repertoire; it’s individuality and intensely personal language having hampered its popularity over the years.

Yet at its heart, the exquisite Lament is also heartrending in its beauty, with Michael Bach’s sensitive malleability in shaping the delicate phrasing bringing a touching sense of fragility to the expressive writing.

Intense

In a further stark contrast, Peter Meechan’s ‘Epitaph No. 2 - Across the Water’, a memorial to those that lost their lives in the D-Day landings, proved to be a much more intense composition, laid out in burnished autumnal colours, played with palpable emotion.     

To close, Oliver Waespi’s creative tour de force, ‘Audivi Media Nocte’, which has quickly become a modern classic; as virtuosic in creation and conception as it is a challenge of immense technicality.  

The sheer energy of the writing was unleashed with almost brutal power as Leyland grappled with the horns of what can be a raging bull of a work.

Outstanding

The atmospheric ghost of Thomas Tallis cast an ethereal shadow over the slower sections, whilst there was some outstanding  delivery of the virtuosic solo passages for cornet, Eb bass, trombone, euphonium and percussion.

It’s surely only a matter of time before this immense work is selected as a major test piece in the UK – although it comes with a significant banding health warning: It can only be truly tamed by the very best on the very best of form: All others will be pole-axed by it.

Leyland bravura performance came very close indeed to keeping it house trained.      

Christopher Thomas