RNCM Festival of Brass: Cory Band

Conductor: Dr Robert Childs
Soloist: David Childs
RNCM, Manchester
Saturday 23rd January

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

The Festival of Brass badly missed Cory and Robert Childs last year, but 2010 saw the Welsh band back in the fold with a cornet section sporting new recruit Tom Hutchinson on the end chair following the retirement of Ian Williams and a programme as demanding and stamina sapping as anything else on offer this year.

Triumphant

With a successful 2009 behind them and the celebrations of the band’s 125th anniversary no doubt still ringing in the player’s ears, it was ‘Triumphant Brass’ by compatriot and Composer in Residence, Gareth Wood, with which the band opened their programme in declamatory fashion.

Written to commemorate the landmark anniversary and conceived symphonically in four movements, the central movements carry references to the band’s “early years of struggle as Ton Temperance” and the mists of the Afan Forest near Swansea, a childhood haunt of the composer.

Closing paragraph

In the fanfares of the opening movement and in common with the closing paragraphs of Wood’s ‘A Tear in the Fabric of Time’, the music recalls the John Adams of ‘A Short Ride in a Fast Machine’ in its motorised rhythms and melodic figurations whilst in the second movement the portrayal of struggle seems to take on the guise of Prokofiev.

Not surprisingly Gareth Wood plays strongly to the band’s soloists, particularly Owen Farr and David Childs although despite a performance of spirit and clarity by the band, the work doesn’t carry the musical weight and substance of ‘Actaeon’, another of Wood’s recent works for Cory.

Close connection

The close connection that has developed between Cory and Karl Jenkins is perhaps not surprising given that Jenkins originates a short distance from Swansea. Jenkins is a busy man though and David Childs was fortunate indeed to be the recipient of his ‘Euphonium Concerto’.

It’s a big piece, cast in four highly contrasted, light hearted and often witty movements that range from circus antics in the first, taking in a melodically simple yet touching ‘Romanza’, a multiphonic ‘Tango’ that reveals Jenkins as Penclawdd’s unlikely answer to Astor Piazzolla and a final Troika with a Welsh twist in ‘Troika Tidy’ (take in a bit of Nessa in Gavin and Stacey for the twist to be revealed!)

Playing from memory, David Childs gave the audience playing of consummate artistry in a piece that makes for an entertaining and refreshing addition to the euphonium repertoire.

Arctic blast

Aagard-Nilsen’s ‘Circius’, his first piece to be played outside Norway in the late 1980’s, made for a brief and bracing start to the second half.

A powerful arctic blast that subsides to a gentle folk like melody at its centre before whirling to a final powerful conclusion, this is music that Bob Childs and the band proved entirely at ease with, as was the case with John McCabe’s ‘The Maunsell Forts’, a work that has paid an unjust price for its misjudged use as the test piece for the 2002 Open. 

Majestic

On that ill fated day, it was Cory that emerged as deserved victors and although the almost unremittingly sombre hues of McCabe’s portrait of Guy Maunsell’s Orwellian wartime early warning stations still seemed to bemuse some members of the audience at the Festival of Brass, the work was given a wonderfully nuanced reading by the band that revealed the work for what it is; a darkly honed yet majestic nocturne that is not only a portrait of the metal monoliths themselves but, as Paul Hindmarsh aptly pointed out, also pays tribute to the men that kept watch from them.

Magnificent

Hermann Pallhuber’s ‘Titan’s Progress’ could hardly be more fitting as a concluding work given Cory’s magnificent winning performance of the piece at Symphony Hall last September.

In Birmingham the band was one of a select few indeed that truly captured the Mahlerian scope of the work with genuine stylistic affinity and although the band was not quite able to match the stunning clarity of detail and texture achieved at Symphony Hall in Manchester, it remained a performance of majestic stature, powerful, full blooded and revealing Cory’s huge yet always cultured sound in all its glory.

Like a Mahler Symphony, it’s a work that possibly shouldn’t be followed with an encore but 'Abide with Me' hit the right spot with the audience and brought Cory’s impressive return to the Festival of Brass to a subdued, yet spiritually uplifting conclusion.

Christopher Thomas   

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