The Music of Gilbert Vinter

Classic Black Dyke playing classic Gilbert Vinter - special talents on special form, or dusty old recordings showing their age?

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Black Dyke Mills Band
Conductor: Geoffrey Brand
Soloists: Maurice Murphy, Michael Langdon
Doyen Recordings: CD256
Total Playing Time: 72.01

Someone once said that it took a very special talent to ruin the music of Mozart. The same is true of Gilbert Vinter. Unfortunately over the years, many a band and conductor have – some very recently indeed.

Thankfully, Geoffrey Brand and his Black Dyke Mills Band wasn’t one of them.

Skill and understanding

Nor is recording engineer Richard Scott either. This digital re-mastering of the famous original recordings is a wonderful achievement – mainly down to his skill and understanding of the medium. 

The 21st century technology used to bring these seminal recordings back to life has been used sympathetically, giving each a freshness that hasn’t robbed them of their original integrity.  The strengths as well as the fragilities of the performances remain intact.

How good

What strikes you most however, is just how good the Black Dyke Band of the time really was. This was a band moving inexorably towards its musical apex – the double winning season of 1972. This was the mature band of Shepherd, Clough, Berry, Clay and Brooke amongst others, coached and prepared by Roy Newsome, directed and polished to major contesting success by Geoffrey Brand. 

Vibrato

What also strikes you is the amount of vibrato this great band used too.

With the advent of low pitch instruments just a few years prior to the first recording in 1969, the sound of the modern brass had been born – but it was a child that certainly inherited aspects of its parent’s musical genes.  

Although not as overtly oscillating as a decade or more before, the off spring has more wobbling chins than members of the Beijing ‘Weight Watchers’ club. Within a decade all that had just about disappeared.

Curious experience

It makes for a curious experience away from the general crackle of the static on a long-playing record (something else that became just about extinct within a decade or two as well). 

However, within seconds you enjoy an authentic brass band sound – clean, crisp and taught – like a well honed middleweight boxer. It is a musical mile away in style and execution from the somewhat blubberous slabs of heavyweight volume we take for granted today.

Suits you

It is also a sound that suits Vinter’s music perfectly too. The sharp wit and subtle humour is displayed with a dry delivery (you hear the clarity of bouncing semi quaver runs in the bass end for instance), whilst the melancholic pathos isn’t drowned in over sentimentality, laid on with a misplaced trowel of globular insensitivity.

It is obvious Geoffrey Brand understands Vinter’s musical voice – and communicates it so well.

Character

The character of ‘John O’ Gaunt’ is brought to life in all its complexities – from the high spirited waywardness to the darkly savage warrior knight. ‘Spectrum’ meanwhile is lusciously coloured – a masterful display of texture and dynamic, tempi and style. These are radiant hues – Rothkoesque blocks of musical pigmentation.

’Triumphant Rhapsody’ is that and more – the only disappointment perhaps that Vinter didn’t stick to his guns and kept the original title, ‘A Matter of Seconds’ – the work is a delightful exploration of a kernel of an idea that is so perfectly stated in its opening bars.

Frailties

In each of the works there are frailties – perhaps due to the way in which these recordings were made. There are mistakes and errors, and untunefulness too – but that is an even greater reason to enjoy them – they have not been sanitised by the technological camouflage tricks that can now be employed by the flick of a switch.

We also get to hear some quite brilliant playing – from James Shepherd’s perfectly accelerated cadenza in ‘Triumphant Rhapsody’ to the glorious opening to ‘Spectrum’ and the vibrant climax of ‘John O’ Gaunt’.  

The Trumpets

As for ‘The Trumpets’?

It is a difficult work to assess in retrospect. An excellent performance (Maurice Murphy is on stunning form) without doubt, but an artistic form that somehow sits uneasily in the brass band medium.

Despite Vinter’s great efforts and the additional forces, it seems rather colourless; a biblical tale told in black and white. 

Not to be

Even at its most forceful it somehow never quite has the power to move you. Perhaps there was so much more to come from the composer that the work would have been transformed in later years (Vinter was adding to it even to his death) as the full extent of the possibilities of his colour palette was explored – but it was not to be.

Tim Mutum’s excellent sleeve notes are a wonderful accompaniment to the release, although the cute ‘mini me’ disc is more of a reminder of the past glories of LP ownership (it would have been great to have seen the original album covers – Shepherd sitting in pomp - included in the insert).
 
Perhaps we must be forever grateful for what we did receive from Gilbert Vinter – he revolutionised the brass band repertoire, paving the way for others to flourish.  This recording, certainly reminds us of that.

Iwan Fox

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