Royal Welsh College of Music Brass Band
Conductor: Dr Robert Childs
Featuring: Martin Green
Soloist: George Fearnley
RWCMD, Cardiff
Thursday 15th February

An anthracite seam of hard reality weaves its way through Martin Green’s homage to the mining communities of the UK that for so long helped them burn brightly to the sound of the musical creativity of brass bands.

‘Love, Spit and Valve Oil’  is his visceral reflection on the loss of the invisible human warmth that once bound together hubs of vibrant expression and debate in Miners Institutes and libraries, sports clubs and pubs.

Now many are like the grate of a long-extinguished coal fire – towns surviving on the cold cinders of soulless shopping outlets and the idle chatter of nail bars.  

It is a highly politicised tract – and all the better for it.

Beacon of hope

Green sees brass bands as a beacon of hope; diminished but unbowed, a DNA microcosm of the qualities that once held their communities together – tribal pride and competitiveness, defined systems and hierarchy, coarse wit and intuitive talent.    

His prose is of the gut rather than the heart; treading a fine line that he himself says on one side evokes the warm nostalgic memories of Hovis adverts and on the other the cold political ideology that crushed hope and lives during the 1984 Miners’ Strike:  It punches you in the stomach yet still lifts the spirit. 

 It punches you in the stomach yet still lifts the spirit. 

The music is equally subterranean in colour and pitch – passionate as well as disturbing, the horn soloist (performed with stunning maturity by student George Fearnley - above) its focal point - raw, uncompromising and uplifting, yet perhaps ultimately pyrrhic in unfulfilled ambition. 

Artistry

It is a celebration of artistry hewn from depths of the earth, moulded by a generational mining discipline, crafted by daily practice and twice weekly rehearsals in the bandroom – and played here with wonderful consideration by the RWCMD students led by Dr Robert Childs. 

The true cost of coal to its communities when a clash of ideologies reduced it to extinction was drilled deep into your mind.

Green does not varnish the emotive impact – the echoing voices speak of communal trust as well as individual despair, the music of struggle as well as joyful endeavour.

The true cost of coal to its communities when a clash of ideologies reduced it to extinction was drilled deep into your mind.

Walter Scott

A musical landscape, unreal but indefatigable provided a fascinating second half of the concert.

Philip Sparke’s ‘Hymn of the Highlands’ is Walter Scott territory – all swishing kilts, bagpipe drones and Braemar Games.  It is however a quite brilliant evocation of a Scotland that exists only on the front of shortbread tins and in nationalistic political rhetoric.  

However, unlike Green’s dark edged portraiture of reality it matters little – the ensemble (and soloists in particular) performing the picture postcards with stylish elan and confidence from the opening to ‘Ardross Castle’  to the final bars of ‘Dundonnell’ .

Iwan Fox