Conductors: Katrina Marzella-Wheeler, Harry Lai
Soloists: David Bremner
2025 RNCM International Brass Band Festival
Sunday 26th January

Meaningful ambition displayed with substantive excellence underpinned the appearance of the RNCM Brass Band at this year’s festival.

Led with thorough preparedness and clarity by Katrina Marzella-Wheeler, with a polished cameo lead by student conductor Harry Lai, a programme of engaging contrasts was delivered with mature accomplishment.  

It opened with Simon Dobson’s emotive ‘HorrorShow’, a work that even a decade after the events at the Bataclan Theatre in Paris unfolded retains an immediate sense of raw pertinence in a world becoming ever increasingly violent in its expressions of alienated disagreement.  

Here the musical discourse was contained within defined boundaries – frustration turning to anger and explosiveness on one hand, kindness and hope on the other.  Katrina Marzella-Wheller trod the fine line between both with diplomatic expertise, the violence countered with a cultured response of optimism. 

Katrina Marzella-Wheller trod the fine line between both with diplomatic expertise, the violence countered with a cultured response of optimism. 

Superb appreciation

David Bremner’s superb appreciation of the substance of the Derek Bourgeois ‘Trombone Concerto’  drew the listener deep into its fearsome core with his wonderfully deceptive sense of elegance.  The dialogue between band and soloist was deliberately defined in its countering intent in the opening section, subtle and achingly tender in its passionate reflection in the central movement. 

The finale was joyously nimble, Bremner controlling the excitement with incremental ease to its crowning climax. 

The finale was joyously nimble, Bremner controlling the excitement with incremental ease to its crowning climax. 

Elan

Elgar Howarth’s teenage ‘Mosaic’ conducted with splendid elan by Harry Lai had provided the substantive aperitif.  

The intricate imagination of the writing retains its startling originality well over 70 years after it was written as a competition piece to commemorate the death of Fred Mortimer (it beat a work by Arthur Butterworth to the prize) – the first sounds of what was to become Howarth’s ‘leitmotif’ embossed with certainty into the score.  

Humane sentiment

Katrina Marzella-Wheeler returned to bring academic rigour as well as humane sentiment to Edward Gregson’s ‘Four Etudes’;  the first three movements neatly characterised in style, from the angular spikiness of the opening ‘Canticle’  and the balletic drive of ‘Dance’  to the acerbic wit of ‘Excentrique’.  In contrast, the last, ‘Aleppo’  was a visceral cry of frustration at man’s inhumanity. 

A fine concert closed with Kelly Marie Murphy’s ‘Drumming the Plain, the Horseman is Coming’,  which evoked the wide expanses of her Canadian homeland and the personal freedom to roam it in all its glory. 

Echoes of Copland and Wilby imbued the music with a pioneering spirit of adventure - something that had been displayed in full by a talented ensemble and its conductors from the first note until last.

Iwan Fox