RNCM Festival of Brass: Leyland Band

Conductor: Jason Katsikaris
RNCM, Manchester
Saturday 23rd January

Images of Leyland's performance can be viewed at: http://www.pbase.com/troonly/10rncmleyland

With Howard Evans taking the baton for the Area championships ahead of Philip Harper’s arrival as MD in the summer, the coming few months are going to represent something of a transitional period for Leyland. 

Celebration

Not that the band’s minds would have been focused entirely on the future at the RNCM on Saturday though, for this was a concert that had the feeling of a celebration; a musical farewell from the band’s outgoing MD, the content of which aptly summed up Jason Katsikaris’s brief, eventful and above all, progressive tenure.

In his own words, he was determined that it was going to be at the Festival of Brass that he said his farewells, for “…this was the event that more than any other, had allowed him to express himself musically away from the restrictions of the contest stage”. 

Indelible link

With a programme that included music by Kenneth Hesketh, Gavin Higgins and two works by Simon Dobson, a composer whose name Jason Katsikaris has become indelibly linked with, the band was not going to waste the opportunity afforded by the occasion.

Ken Hesketh’s ‘Whirlegigg’, a celebratory appealing, if unadventurous moto perpetuo, that spins relentlessly before appearing to run out of energy only to gather itself for a final burst of concluding excitement, proved to be a brief yet effective opening to the concert.

It is almost impossible to listen to Hesketh’s music without imagining what he would do with a band was he to write unconstrained. In the meantime we shall have to make do with a handful of pieces, mostly elaborations of material he wrote in his youth that paint the band facing side of his double edged creative personality.      

Twilight atmosphere

‘The Binding of the Wolf’, a relatively early work in his output from 1990, and pre-dating his later harmonic complexity, represented featured composer Torstein Aagaard-Nilsen.

Although not strictly programmatic, the music evokes the twilight atmosphere of Norse mythology in a gruesome tale of the demonic wolf Fenrir, locked up by the gods when it grew too large and fierce.

It does so in mysteriously brooding, often threatening atmospheres that suddenly erupt into savage, percussive violence. It was lent a vivid, life like realism in the powerful, dynamically wide ranging reading given by MD and band.

Tension and Torsion

Simon Dobson’s new work ‘Torsion’ occupies very different musical territory to ‘Penlee’ and ‘Lyonesse’, the latter being the work that was to close Leyland’s concert.

Cast in three movements, ‘Time’, ‘Light’ and ‘Sound’, the music deals with what the composer describes as the “dis”tortions and “con”tortions of these elements.

In the opening movement, it could easily have been given the title “tension” such was the energy generated by the driving, rhythmically exciting fusion of funk jazz.

Luminosity

In complete contrast the glowing luminosity of the gorgeous slow movement showed Dobson in a very different ‘light’, whilst the technically challenging, action packed final movement, complete with a surprisingly effective quote from John Golland’s ‘Sounds’ and delivered with enormous energy, confirmed ‘Torsion’ as another major step forward in the composer’s increasingly impressive output.

Bramwell Coles’ corker of a march, ‘The Conflict’, crammed with colour and swagger, got the second half of the concert off to a lively start before Gavin Higgins became the centre of attention with ‘Fanfares and Lovesongs’.

Written for the National Childrens’ Band, the joyous cornet dominated fanfares of the brief opening movement precede a slow section that is very much the core of the work. 

The composer lays his heart on his sleeve in music marked by some melting harmony playing, the counterfoil to a lively finale, that occasionally brought to mind McCabe in its chordal progressions and rhythmic figurations. 

Vivid

Leyland played Simon Dobson’s ‘Lyonesse’ in Manchester two years ago, but its vivid, imaginative and atmospheric evocation of the lost Cornish land of Tristan and Iseult seemed even more majestic this time round - no doubt charged emotionally by the sense of occasion.     
                                                   
Jason Katsikaris’s final musical word fell to an encore of Philip Littlemore’s Brass in Concert prize winning arrangement of Morten Lauridson’s ‘O Magnum Mysterium’, played with a heartfelt emotion underlined by the fact that at least two members of the band could be seen with tears streaming down their faces.....and that’s not to mention Simon Dobson who was sitting just behind us.  
 
Breath of fresh air

A few deeply felt words of thanks to the band and to Paul Hindmarsh and he was gone.....just a matter of a few days away from returning to his former life as a lawyer in Australia.

Something tells us we haven’t seen the last of Jason Katsikaris, but in the short term at least, the band movement in the UK is going to miss him.

He’s been a breath of fresh Antipodean air.         

Chris Thomas

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