Foden’s opened the 2023 RNCM Brass Band Festival with a programme infused by contrasting forms of celebration.

The remarkable musical life of Bramwell Tovey was recalled through performance, composition and commemoration - the latter a touching tribute paid by Howard Snell with an ethereal setting of Charles Villiers Stanford’s part-song ‘The Blue Bird’,  with text by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge narrated by Paul Hindmarsh.

Extra dimensions

A consummate communicator and promoter of youthful talent, Tovey would have been delighted to have led the National Champion alongside Roksana Dabkowska in his ‘Pictures in the Smoke’. 

The homage to the cosmopolitan delights of New York plays with time and era, his love of jazz, Bernstein and melancholy. The extra dimension of seeing him, showman twinkle in his eye, sat at the piano was missed, but Dabkowska’s informed approach aided by Michael Fowles’ controlled linkage made for an absorbing performance.  

‘Coventry Variations’  (premiered in its extended form here in 2004) explored much deeper emotions of loss; with the central variation ‘For the Children’  inspired by the famous wartime picture of youngsters playing in the ruins of the contentiously blitzed city, a thread of hopefulness amid the despair. 

‘Coventry Variations’  (premiered in its extended form here in 2004) explored much deeper emotions of loss; with the central variation ‘For the Children’  inspired by the famous wartime picture of youngsters playing in the ruins of the contentiously blitzed city, a thread of hopefulness amid the despair. 

Structured with informed consideration by the MD, its powerful, reflective essence of turmoil, tragedy and triumph lost none of its impact.  

Battle of wits

Tovey would surely have also enjoyed playing with the musical imagery of Wilfred Heaton’s youthfully anarchic march ‘Glory! Glory!’. 

A battle of wits and roadside rights of way between somewhat feral Boys’ Brigade buglers and their more refined SA Band counterparts, it ended in a diplomatic score draw, whilst the band’s encore to close the evening also tipped the hat to his SA lineage with George Marshall’s ‘Spirit of Praise’.

Before that, Paul Hindmarsh’s arrangement of Howard Blake’s ‘Sinfonietta’  certainly ended in a significant victory for the composer (who was in the audience). 

Clumsily butchered into ‘Fusions’  by Bram Gay for use at the 1986 British Open, it has been restored with purposeful authenticity; dark and serious, the lack of frippery revealing a demanding canvas of block requirements of balance and tonality.  

Clumsily butchered into ‘Fusions’  by Bram Gay for use at the 1986 British Open, it has been restored with purposeful authenticity; dark and serious, the lack of frippery revealing a demanding canvas of block requirements of balance and tonality.  

The leaner 10-piece original (written for the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble) may still work best, but this was a timely reminder of the talents of yet another composer the banding movement treated with ignorant disdain.  

Mastery

With the concert also seeing the launch of the band’s latest ‘Seascapes’ CD, there was the opportunity to revel in Howard Snell’s mastery of tonal transcription in Debussy’s ‘La Cathedrale Engloutie’  (The Submerged Cathedral) – the first 20 seconds or so of which are startling in its soundscape colourings.

It was balanced by ‘James Cook – Circumnavigator’  – not quite Errol Flynn in swashbuckling adventurism, but subtly paced by Michael Fowles (and to the score).

A somewhat messy death didn’t detract from a performance that captured the sense of British navy pomp and plunder to a tee.      

Iwan Fox