Fanfare and Final Flourish

Kirkwall Town Band
Orkney Schools Brass Band
RSAMD Brass
Pickaquoy Centre, Kirkwall
Wednesday 22nd June

The Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama Brass consisted of: Clarence Adoo  Head=Space; Mark O'Keefe trumpet; John Kenny trombone, carynx; Torbjörn Hultmark trumpets, flugel horn conducted by Elaine Geddes.

It is a recipe which the planners of this concert would have done well to have heeded.  As it was, the evening was rather disjointed and indigestible.  It was a pity, as a large audience had come to enjoy this, the ‘final flourish' of this year's St. Magnus Festival, featuring local bands and the return to the concert platform of Clarence Adoo.

The evening began well enough with the RSAMD Brass's antiphonal rendition of Gabrieli's 'Canzon Duodecimi Toni a 10'.  Thereafter, what we got was an over-liberal helping of the second of Jones's ingredients. I like to think I am receptive to new and difficult music, but I must admit that by the end of the first half I felt myself in urgent need of liquid refreshment.  

Mark O'Keefe (principal trumpet, BBCSSO) played two items for solo trumpet.  My first pang of unease came early on when O'Keefe informed us all that Edward McGuire's 'Prelude 22 – The Big Bang'  would require a degree of audience participation; my anxiety turned out to be well-founded.  This was the first of the evening's world premieres.  The consequences of the original big bang are eternal; this work is unlikely to enjoy the same fate.

Better was O'Keefe's second offering – John Maxwell Geddes's 'The Trouble with Tritons'.  The soloist gave a witty, and at times very funny impression of a bad-tempered triton struggling to control a group of unruly horses.   Unfortunately, whether by direction or choice, O'Keefe played the entire piece off stage, leaving the audience with nothing to look at except the tacet members of the RSAMD Brass, awaiting their turn to play.

Sandwiched between the two solo pieces, RSAMD Brass lightened the mood a little with an arrangement of Hamish MacCunn's 'Land of the Mountain and the Flood', which was pleasant enough, if a little insecure at times.  And the audience might just have headed for their mid-session refreshment in better spirits if the third ingredient of the Jones recipe had been added to the mix.  What we got, though, was Mark Anthony Turnage's 'Set To'.  Quite a bit of Turnage's music is fairly raucous, and this piece was no exception, based as it is on football crowd chants.  It was exceptionally well played by the RSAMD Brass, and for me was the best item of the concert, but it wasn't quite what we needed at that particular point.

The second half opened with a new work, 'HeadSpace', by John Kenny, written for Clarence Adoo and a new computerised instrument, also called head=space, designed to allow quadriplegic musicians to engage again in musical activity.  Joining Adoo on stage were Kenny (trombone and carynx), Torbjörn Hultmark (trumpets and flugel horn) and Chris Wheeler (sound projection).

I make no claims to being a sophisticated music critic, and nothing would give me greater pleasure to report Adoo's return to the stage in a blaze of musical glory,  but I have to say that the piece left me cold – and I am pretty sure I wasn't the only one.  We had only just recovered from the ear-bending fusillade of the first half.  To then be confronted by a further 20 minutes of difficult, atonal music risked stretching the audience's goodwill to breaking point.  (At least, I think it was 20 minutes – it seemed a lot longer.) 

I would love to be able to tell you about Adoo's performance, but the truth of the matter is that it was almost impossible to tell which sounds emanating from the loudspeakers were the results of Adoo's skill on the new instrument, and which were the products of the sound projectionist.  And whatever the future holds for the carynx (a bronze Pictish war trumpet), it isn't going to produce tunes you can whistle on the way home.  Perhaps it is just as well that, at the moment, only one of them exists.

Anyone who had got this far – and to be fair, almost all of the audience had returned for the second half – had no doubt been hoping that the final item, Handel, would provide a more conventional contrast to what had gone before, even if it was not exactly ‘foot tappy'.  Even here, though, we were slightly disappointed, as a more careful scrutiny of the programme should have warned us.  'Music for the Royal Waterworks' is not one of Handel's originals.  The item brought together all the performers for a grand finale.  A discreet veil should be drawn over an attempt by the RSAMD Brass to play the 'Fireworks overture' to an electronic beat.  And here, as elsewhere in the concert, the use of frequent, unsubtle humour just became tiresome.

Reading over what I've written gives a rather negative impression of this concert.  Let me redress the balance a bit:  the RSAMD Brass played very well, sometimes under difficult circumstances. Earlier in the festival, their other concerts had been enthusiastically received.  In particular, five of their number, as Thistle Brass, had given a couple of very high quality quintet concerts in other parts of the Orkneys, playing music by Philip Wilby, Peter Maxwell-Davies and Oystein Baadsvik, amongst others. 

The Kirkwall Town Band and the Orkney Schools Brass Band played well in their one contribution to the concert, maintaining their dignity while others on stage were sacrificing theirs.  Mark O'Keefe was technically impressive and assured, and Clarence Adoo showed remarkable courage and fortitude in his return to performance, having mastered a brand new instrument.  He can hardly be held responsible for the music he was asked to play, as it is in all probability the only piece currently in the head=space's repertoire.  I sincerely hope that pieces more worthy of his talents are forthcoming.

The point is that this concert was the culmination of a six day festival, featuring the local band and local kids, and people like to let their hair down a bit on these occasions.  The lady sitting next to me was one of the festival patrons.  Her body language spoke volumes.  Before the second half started, she asked me in a sceptical tone,  "are you enjoying this?"  I am ashamed to say I lied, and said ‘yes'.  When 'HeadSpace' struck up, she seemed to deflate, like a balloon with a puncture.

John Wallace had originally been billed for this concert.  His withdrawal came in time for the festival programme to be altered, although the sponsor, who produced their own concert leaflets, was not so lucky.  The local press cited Wallace's retirement from the concert platform as the reason for his absence (although I couldn't help noticing that he was playing in public as recently as June 6th, in London); John Kenny, addressing the audience, told us the trumpeter was ‘indisposed'.  Either explanation may be true.  But if Wallace had taken a look at the proposed programme and had made his excuses, I wouldn't have blamed him.

Alec Gallagher

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