Electric Brass

Parc and Dare Band
Conductor: Craig Roberts
Soloists: Nicole Lyons, Ruth Woodhams, trumpets
Royal Academy of Music,
Saturday 9th September

In Birmingham, nineteen bands were engaged in Open combat, trying to bludgeon each other into submission with Philip Wilby's latest opus, Vienna Nights.  Meanwhile, two hundred miles away in London, the Parc and Dare Band were blowing the dust off one of the composer's older works as part of a challenging programme of music entitled Electric Brass.  It is ironic that by the end of the evening, the new work had probably already been given more performances than the one written in 1994.

Dance Before The Lord, scored for augmented band, organ and live electronics brought an innovative and stimulating concert to a joyous and noisy conclusion, in which the electronic element was sometimes swamped by the sheer weight of brass.  But this was the only piece to suffer from the problem, and in the earlier pieces the balance between the band and electronics sounded just about right from where I was sitting.

One of the good things about Tim Souster's Echoes is that the live electronics inevitably mean that no two performances are exactly the same.  I've heard this piece live three times now, and there are always new nuances to enjoy.  Desford's recording of the piece, too, provides a helpful comparison.  With the sound reverberating around the auditorium, it must be useful for the band to have a clear beat to follow, and Craig Roberts certainly provided that in a competent if not especially exciting performance.

Torstein Aagard-Nilsen's Songs from a Singing Mountain (from Riffs and Interludes) featured electronically enhanced soprano and principal cornet while the band remained au naturel.  I wasn't familiar with this piece, but the band sounded comfortable enough with it.

Journey to the Centre of the Earth (Peter Graham) was included in the programme on the rather tenuous basis that the (optional) use of a recorded CD for a few seconds qualifies it as electronic music.  No matter. The audience was not inclined to be too picky, and it was a pretty good reading of the piece with lots of fine solo work.  Although, in another irony, the one soloist who fouled up was the CD operator, cueing the whispering effect several pages of the score too early, before poor old Axel Lidenbrock had even parted company with his chums.

If the inclusion of Journey in the programme could be considered tenuous, then the inclusion of Andrew Powell's Falstaff,  which the composer merely intended to be for band and electronics before changing his mind, ought to be considered tenuous to the power of two.  Powell decided that he could achieve the effects he wanted without electronic intervention, and Parc and Dare's performance, in this writer's opinion, showed the band at their best, giving a committed and genuinely thrilling performance.  This is a highly approachable piece of music from an audience's point of view.  Why it does not get more outings is a mystery. 

The band's contributions were interspersed with the solo trumpet of Nicole Lyons, who one presumes is a student of the RAM (the programme was a bit vague on the subject).  She opened the concert with The Fountains, by Arthur Gottschalk, an inoffensive piece of fairly conventional melody with some occasional jazziness, set against a recorded electronic background. 

Duplicity, by Steve Bingham, was originally written for electric violin, and based on a piece by the American minimalist composer Steve Reich.  I suppose there is no reason why the piece shouldn't be played on a trumpet, but then again, after listening to it, I couldn't hear any compelling reason why it should.  Anyway, it was only a couple or so minutes long, and gave the band's lips and the audience's ears a brief respite.

Ms Lyons' best contribution (again, in this writer's opinion), was Variations Towards a Theme, another work by Andrew Powell, in which she was joined by Ruth Woodhams, also on trumpet.  The piece made extensive use of electronic effects and had an element of theatre about it, as the two soloists shifted positions to direct the instruments towards different microphones.  As the title implies, the theme only appears at the end of the piece.  If the theme was a familiar one, I regret I was unable to spot it – a failing on my part, not on the composer's!

Nicole Lyons' final piece was Roger Smalley's Echo III, in which everything the soloist plays is repeated back through the speakers at 5 and 10 second intervals, setting up a three part canon.  I have struggled to enjoy this piece ever since buying John Wallace's recording of it, and I'm afraid tonight's rendition didn't bring the struggle to an end.  It was nothing to do with the soloist's performance, which was pretty secure throughout the evening - more to do with the music itself.  Apart from anything else, it cannot be much fun for a player to hear their fluffs being repeated back at them at 5 and 10 second intervals!

In summary then, a fine concert of which the organisers and performers ought to be very proud.  The band was not note perfect, which some contest-orientated bandsmen may claim is the most important thing; but they played to a high standard and any blemishes there may have been did not detract from the overall musical integrity of the evening.  The band's soloists (particularly soprano cornet, solo baritone and Ebb tuba) made many fine contributions and Craig Roberts held the whole proceedings together with an authoritative beat and an informal rapport with the audience.  If I have a tiny reservation, it is that while the antediluvian creatures in Peter Graham's Journey are long extinct, there still exists a species of soprano cornet player which insists on making the end of pieces untidy by sustaining high notes long after the rest of the band have finished playing.

All the performers (and the audience) should also be commended on their powers of concentration, despite the best efforts of a highly unprofessional cameraman to distract them with flash photography throughout the entire concert.  We must hope that someone from the Lensmans Union sends him a Guide to Concert Etiquette for Photographers very soon.

And finally, the audience itself.  It is amazing that in a corner of the country where there must be hundreds, perhaps thousands of bandsmen, a rare event like this can only attract an audience of about 35 people, a figure more usually associated with the performances of less fancied bands at major contests.  They can't all have been at the Open or the Last Night of the Proms, can they?

At least three of the assembled gathering appeared to be associated with the band, and they led the applause as the band took and departed the stage.  Two of them were quite beefy chaps, and one glance from them, one feels, would have dissuaded the rest of us from showing anything less than rampant enthusiasm.  But no such encouragement was needed – this was a fine enterprise by a good band and a talented young trumpet player.  Well done.  Let's have some more.

Alec Gallagher

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