RNCM - Brighouse & Rastrick

Conductor: Alan Morrison
Soloist: Michael Howley
RNCM Festival of Brass
RNCM, Manchester
Sunday 1st February

Perfect posture: Michael Howley takes centre stage with Brighouse
Picture: Ian Clowes

More pictures at: http://www.pbase.com/troonly/0901_rncm_festival

The weeks and days immediately prior to the Festival of Brass must have been busy, not to say interesting ones for Brighouse, with the news breaking firstly that Garry Cutt will be taking the band to the Yorkshire Regional Championship and secondly, the revelatory announcement that the services of David King have been secured as the band’s forthcoming professional conductor.

Excel

Alan Morrison’s position continues as Resident Conductor, a role in which he will surely excel. Time will tell whether it is a very different B & R that we see at next year’s Festival of Brass then, but in the meantime it was business as usual on Sunday evening, as the Brighouse boys brought the Festival to a conclusion with a programme that drew all of this year’s thematic strands together in some style.

'Triumphant Rhapsody' is a pretty exhilarating way to start a concert and the piece that Gilbert Vinter wrote in 1965 as a sequel to 'Variations on a Ninth' (he abandoned the original title he had in mind of 'A Matter of Seconds') gave Brighouse a good work out as well as an opportunity to show what the band is currently made of.

As quoted in the Festival programme, the composer’s son Andrew neatly summed up the kaleidoscopic variety of the piece when he referred to “...the rapid mood changes, the diminished note drop, the spine-tingling bits that maddeningly never reoccur, the power, the tears and above all the humour”. We can say no more.

Lyrical music

The opening passages were not without the odd moments of tentativeness from the band with detail not always clear in the cornets, although as the piece progressed the lyrical music at the heart of the work was finely wrought by Alan Morrison and the band, with an impressive cornet cadenza from Stephen Wilkinson leading into the finale.

This is a band with a big sound and there was a just a tendency for it to spill over into edginess at times although there was certainly no shortage of enthusiasm in the playing.

The fact that Alan Morrison’s glasses were locked in his dressing room and had to be rescued by Paul Hindmarsh following the Vinter did not seem to throw him, despite trying to read from a score he claimed was a blur!  

Engaging work

Mike Howley was the soloist in the 'Euphonium Concerto' by Joseph Horovitz, a work that dates to 1972 and tied in nicely with another of the Festival themes, namely the music of the 1970’s. It also happens to be the very first Euphonium Concerto written for brass band and remains one of the most popular in the repertoire.

It’s a highly melodic and engaging work, demanding for both soloist and band and being cast in three clear movements with a hauntingly beautiful slow movement at its centre evoking the landscape and beauty of the border country.

Eloquent

Michael Howley proved to be an eloquent soloist, lyrically appealing in the gorgeous central movement and capturing the sense of fun in the final movement with considerable style.

It was a shame therefore that there were passages, particularly in the outer movements, where the band did not seem to be on his side, masking some of the detail of the euphonium part with accompaniment that was just too heavy for the relatively light sound of the soloist.

The performance proved to be an apt reminder however of just how appealing a work the Horovitz Concerto is.

Impressed the most

Of all six works in the concert it was Brighouse’s performance of John McCabe’s 'Images' that for our money impressed the most, bringing the first half to a particularly satisfying conclusion. This is music that simply seemed to suit the sound of the band, with both players and conductor well tuned in to the technical and musical demands of the piece.

Perhaps it’s down to the fact that the abstract nature of the music, with little call for raw emotion, plays to the band’s strengths; either way, the boys certainly seemed to enjoy playing it. What we got was an all round effort around the stands although John Lee was notably impressive in coping with the considerable demands of the flugel part.  

Interesting

It would have been an interesting exercise to carry out a little market research on the audience after the performance with a view to assessing views on the piece over a quarter of a century after the 'Rite of Spring' like scenes at that infamous round of Regional contests in 1983.

Yes, 'Images' still comes across as having a tougher, altogether grittier edge than 'Cloudcatcher Fells' but many of the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic patterns employed in the work stamp it very clearly as being by the same composer. There are also passages of real beauty in the piece that are right up there with some of those in 'Cloudcatcher'.

Demanding

Why then, in comparison to our love affair with 'Cloudcatcher', the piece remains condemned to eternal damnation in some quarters is both a mystery and a travesty and perhaps it’s time to give it another run on the contest stage; it’s certainly still demanding enough to test at the highest level.

Brash

If 'Images' showed Brighouse at its best, 'Journey Into Freedom', the eagerly anticipated opening work in the second half, arguably showed the band somewhere towards the other end of the scale. On a purely technical level, it was approached as a tour de force, powerful and even brash at times but with very little in the way of affection or emotion.

If only the band could have played with its collective hearts on its sleeve we might have got something more from the performance, but in Eric Ball, perhaps above all else in the way of original brass band music, we need to feel that the music comes from the heart. As technically assured as the playing was, this simply did not.

Spirit

To a slightly lesser degree, the same comment could be levelled at the work that followed. Anyone present at the Masters in 2007 will have witnessed just how difficult a piece Elgar Howarth’s 'In Memoriam RK' is to pull off.

Getting inside the spirit and language of the late romantics, in particular Mahler and Richard Strauss, is not something that comes naturally to bands and once again Brighouse gave a technically assured reading that was secure from top to bottom of the band.

Extraordinary piece

But this is an extraordinary piece that calls for extraordinary musicianship from all and despite the warmth of the band sound, the feeling come the concluding bars was that the performance had not quite plumbed the emotional depths in the way that the very best performance can.
 
There were no such concerns evident in Philip Wilby’s 'The New Jerusalem' however, the work with which Brighouse rounded off both its concert and the Festival of Brass 2009.

With Philip Wilby, John McCabe and Edward Gregson sitting together to listen (no pressure there then!) Paul Hindmarsh said his customary thank you’s to all concerned and introduced the work as Philip Wilby’s first for the medium, commissioned as it was for the NYBBGB in 1989.

Life change

As the composer had commented at the open discussion before the concert, his subsequent association with brass bands was to change his life and although The New Jerusalem is concerned with the Book of Revelation, as well as the fall of the Berlin Wall (an event that was contemporaneous with the composition of the piece) it could also be seen as a metaphor for the arrival of Philip Wilby in the brass band world. 

Twenty years on it is difficult to imagine what banding life would be like without his music.

It is now seventeen years since Grimethorpe secured its legendary victory on the work at the Royal Albert Hall, since when it has become one of the composer’s lesser heard pieces. 

Shame

On the evidence of Brighouse’s performance here though, it is a shame that we don’t get to hear it more often, for despite it being Wilby’s shortest major work for band, it’s a powerful piece of writing that Alan Morrison and his men delivered in equally powerful fashion.

If we were going to be picky, the evocative off stage cornet part could have done with being a little more distant, but it was a triumphant ending, received with spirited enthusiasm by the audience who were rewarded with a spritely encore of 'Jubilee March', delivered at a cracking tempo.

Action packed

And so closed another RNCM Festival of Brass; an intensive, action packed weekend of music that once again served to underline the crucial importance of the Festival in the brass band calendar.

There is simply nothing else to match it for the dedicated enthusiast of brass band repertoire and performance. Paul Hindmarsh tells us that he has not yet finalised the themes for next year’s Festival but there is little need for us to worry about that.

It’s in very safe hands.

Christopher Thomas

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