The Subscription Rooms in the Gloucestershire market town of Stroud continues to be one of the most engaging concert venues in the UK, with its long established brass band series attracting many of the movement’s finest outfits, dawn by the promise of warm welcome and informed audience.
Taste buds
The invited bands invariably tickle the taste buds - providing repertoire that showcases their musical and technical excellence; with Tredegar’s eagerly anticipated return certainly sending home plenty of well satisfied listeners.
Their reputation as innovative concert providers saw Ian Porthouse cleverly mix and match his programme, with reprise items from their 2014 Brass in Concert set such as the bubbling ‘Brassman’s Holiday’ sitting neatly alongside the specially commissioned ‘Colours in Rain’ by Daniel Hall, used at the bands 2014 British Open ‘Eve of Contest’ concert.
Fizzing
It was though a fizzing run through ‘Carnival Romain’ that certainly set the pulses racing of delighted traditionalists - aided by a sublime piece of euphonium oratory by Matthew White in the famous cor anglais solo.
The impressive quartet of featured soloists were on classy form; Ian Roberts with a delicate ‘La Califfa’ and Danny Winder with a melancholic ‘Eyes of a Child’, contrasting the rampant swagger of Dewi Griffiths on ‘Georgia on My Mind’ and Matthew White displaying the whizz-bang side of his skill set with the breathtaking technique of ‘Cairdeas’.
‘All Night Long’, ‘Bugler’s Holiday’ and ‘Indiana Jones’ were tasty lollipops, whilst the march ‘Call of the Brave’ and the tasteful refinement of ‘Myfanwy’ and ‘Gresford’ were fine examples of stylistic musical substance.
Cruise control
With a keen ear for the compact acoustic and a firm hand on ensemble precision and tempo, it was cruise control playing from start to finish from the Welsh heavyweight, with ‘Glorifico Aeternum’ finally seeing the MD flick the turbo power switch to pin back the ears, and the fun packed choreography of ‘Can’t Nobody Do Me Like Jesus’ to send everyone home with an evangelical skip in their step.
Dave Banwell
