Kapitol Brass

Highlights of the Besson National Brass Band Championship Gala Concert 2004
Black Dyke Band; The Band of Her Majesty’s Royal Marines
Conductors: Dr. Nicholas Childs; Lt. Col. Chris Davies
Doyen Recordings: CD191
Total Playing Time: 66.24

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The comedian Billy Connolly once made the remark that when the audience made their way back to their wee homes after one of his shows, two things happened to them: The first was that they had a greater propensity to subconsciously use terribly profane language in the mildest of circumstances -such as hailing a taxi or paying for the groceries at Tesco; whilst the second was that when it came to recalling what they had actually heard from him during the past hour and a half, they couldn't remember a single thing of what he had said. 

Perhaps a week or so later, the swearing may have died down, but there would he remarked, be occasional lucid moments when flashes of what had he had said would somehow be recalled, and the individual would lapse into uncontrollable fits of laughter for no apparent reason.

In a strange way, this recording has much the same effect – although we are not necessarily talking about the giggles.

The beauty of a live event is that your memory plays tricks with you when it comes to recalling exactly what went on some time later. The selective processes of recall tend to home in on what you imagined were great and good, or terrible and bad for that matter and brush over what was in fact merely competent.  This is what makes for all those tales of urban myth about performances of yesteryear – you cannot correct what your memory thought about something if it will never be heard again. 

Billy Connolly was dead right; after a brass band contest, you invariably keep whistling the big tunes of the test piece for about a week later (although this is a matter for debate with some of the more obscure offerings of recent times), but you can't really recall with great lucidity anything about the performances of the piece from perhaps any of the twenty bands who played it. It is only when you get to hear a CD like this that the reality of the occasion comes flooding back to swamp all those rose tinted thoughts.

That is perhaps the case with Black Dyke's winning performance of ‘…all the flowers of the mountain…' which provides the centrepiece of the release.  It is a performance of great musical shape and at times intensity of purpose, but it is also a performance that is far from error free. However those slips do not detract from what was then, and what is now a most elegant and eloquent musical picture.

On recalling the performance on the day we looked back at our comments made live at the contest, and a couple of things still stand out. The first is the deliberate way in which Dr Childs lays out the last third of the piece; subdued in tempo and with a flow and pulse that reiterated the opening section of the work – even as the piece closes there is no sense of over dramatic sentimentality and it ends as it begun, with the required floating feeling.  The second is the sense of understanding of what was required of a very opaque score from the MD – there was lot of the conductor's heart and soul in this one.

One ‘Big Yin' moment though: Our memory recalls quite clearly a huge split by the second soprano (the trumpeter Jamie Prophet) when he literally ‘went for it' with the top C entry after figure 7 in the piece. We made a huge note of it in our comments and it certainly raised a few eyebrows in the Hall at the time and afterwards, but it seems to have been lost in either the acoustic of the recording or the editing suite. We hope it hasn't been scrubbed – or perhaps as Billy says, our memory isn't as good as it used to be.

Back to the Gala Concert then, which was a fine event; but it was played out to a hall that was perhaps only half full, and featured a very tired sounding Black Dyke (for obvious reasons) and the Royal Marines who on reflection from this release were certainly not as good as possibly the memory may recall. 

The new revived idea of a Gala Concert itself though deserves to succeed. Memories of Gala occasions of almost State Opening of Parliament proportions, when there was a cast Cecil B De Mille would have found hard to orchestrate are memories that have acquired a ludicrous degree of nostalgia about them.  The reason why the immediate post war Festival Concerts were full, was there was nothing else on offer for bandsmen on a single Saturday night out in London – the 1950's to the mid 1960's were an awfully drab period of unmitigated grey dampness in Britain.  When something else did come along (about the time of the Beatles) the thing died out because it was outdated, boring, and frankly rubbish.

Thankfully that is not the case today, with a slimmed down and much more user friendly ‘Concert' (the old events were crammed full of test pieces, overtures and awful novelty items that even the BBC could no longer stomach to record), and as such it should now have a decent future if the now money conscious, selective entertainment customer can be attracted back.  Saturday night in London is now full of bright lights, cheap prices and almost inexhaustible choice of things to see.

The problem lies in getting acts to fill a very big hall – and in Black Dyke and the Royal Marines you have perhaps the very best of two musical worlds, and they did try mighty hard to make it an event to remember, but still there were plenty of plush red seats to be seen.

The music was pretty good too – although the Marines were on scratchy and at times untuneful form (especially the first number on the disc) and Black Dyke had a slight air about them that they would have preferred to be elsewhere (and who could blame them). It all became a bit too safe (and under rehearsed in the massed bands items), but Dyke had enough professionalism (their items are in a different class) about them to still shine where it mattered, and in Roger Webster and David Thornton the class showed.

Some of the items certainly thrilled the audience though (some pretty aimless drumming in ‘Windows of the World' got a few hoots) and overall it was a relaxed enough occasion which sent the good burghers home with tunes to hum but nothing quite memorable to stick firmly in the memory banks.

Billy Connolly had it right all along.

Iwan Fox.

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