Having heard Paul Mealor’s intrinsically textured ‘Fantasia on a Theme of Henry Purcell’ played with such mature sensibility here in Monmouth, you were left to hope that the brass band movement  doesn’t yet again miss the chance to engage the talents of a major British composer to write a series of works for the medium.

It has become a depressingly lengthy list of clumsily lost opportunities over the years, as we have headed myopically into a cul-de-sac of technique driven test-piece fluff from composers with little more to say than over-familiar regurgitated musical platitudes. 

Investigative brio

Thankfully, the National Youth Band of Wales has continued to explore its compositional opportunities with a sense of investigative brio (the Welsh born, American based Hilary Tann writing a lovely work last year); with Mealor’s latest opus a bold, but subtly enlarged reconstruction of an earlier Purcell ‘Rhapsody’ he wrote nearly twenty years ago. 
 
As he admitted, technique may have advanced almost exponentially in the intervening decades, but musically it’s another matter altogether: His refined, linear writing, layered like Baroque inspired seams of coal intertwined and sandwiched on top each other, was a joy to hear. It was a choral hinterland of scoring underpinned by a clearly defined appreciation of the brass band sound palette.

Heft

The technical hurdles were stern (notably the euphonium cadenza) but they never tarnished the richly flowing style with a harsh, inconsequential veneer of bling. It was music of heft without an ounce of unwarranted baggage. 

It provided the fine climax to a concert of substance led by Tom Davoren, who had obviously worked his young charges hard as they produced performances of detail, balance and dynamic variance - a result of impressive conducting control and engagement.

Cunning

Earlier, Gareth Glynn’s symphonic ‘Dolbadarn Millennium Fanfare’ provided a spirited opening statement of intent, followed by a fine rendition of the conductor’s exploration of the duplicitous psychological make-up of one of Shakespeare’s finest malevolent characters, in the Iago inspired ‘Divinity of Hell’; a darkly hued portrait of a cunning, conniving paradox.

The late Mervyn Burtch’s ‘Paean’ was also a welcome inclusion - another compositional voice that is being sympathetically brought back to prominence by Ty Cerdd’s enlightened ‘joined-up’ curatorship of its National Youth musical bodies. His distinctive writing was treated with nuanced refinement by MD and players alike. 

Masterclasses

That was also the case with the accompaniment to guest soloist Glenn Van Looy, who was on superb form with Peter Meechan’s Mozart inspired ‘Requiem Paraphrases’ and the emotive ‘Windy City Heartbreak’ (a new arrangement by Tom Davoren of his critically acclaimed wind orchestra piece): They were masterclasses of technique and musicality. 

It rather summed up a concert that certainly engaged the musical grey matter of a well satisfied audience. 

Let’s hope in the case of compositions from the pen of Paul Mealor in particular, it won’t be the last time either.

Iwan Fox