The latest concert by this ever inventive ensemble was the last to be led by their admirable founder and conductor Matthew Leach. 

Bold accounts

As always, the repertoire was colourful and engaging - adjectives that could have readily described the performances themselves, as the band provided bold accounts of works by student composers Nic Mills, Daniel Soley and Carl Blades to compliment original repertoire by Philip Sparke and Paul Lovatt-Cooper and arrangements of iconic snippets of Dvorak and Elgar.

The young composers are ones to keep an eye on: Their growing maturity currently embracing the current trend for filmatic bite sized excitement; catchy themes and motifs leaving a pleasant, if not particularly substantial impression on the listener’s mind.  

However, their engaging raw material, (despite being coupled to the other rather tiresome trend for bombastic titles) is enlightening. 

Dig deeper

Dig a little deeper beneath the familiar soundtrack surface traits and you can certainly hear the murmurings of weightier compositional voices; with ‘Planet’s Rising’, ‘Out of this World’ and ‘Forces of Nature & Remembrance’, works that could well be revisited by Mills to develop the neatly packaged individual elements into a more coherent whole.

So to Soley’s ‘Salto Angel’ - inspired by the magnificent grandeur of the famous ‘Angel Falls’, but at present an enjoyable, if all too briefly explored postcard snapshot. 

Closer study

A closer study of Philip Sparke’s perfectly proportioned ‘Jubilee Overture’ - so expertly tailored it could have been composed in honour of Saville Row let alone the old GUS Band, would serve well.

And whilst a glance towards PLC’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, may reveal the type of flashy tailored bling of those Congolese Sapeurs in a recent Guinness advert, it still has the unmistakable stamp of clearly focussed fashionable design.

Tenderness

Dvorak’s ‘Rusalka’s  Song to the Moon’ - played with touching tenderness by the excellent Will Norman, and Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ inhabit a different league altogether (the brass band arrangement are penned by the class acts of Gordon Langford and Denis Wright), although their deceptively simple structures hide deep seated emotions of intense maturity.

Much more

With Carl Blades’s, ‘Across the Galaxy’ cut from the same filmatic cloth, you were left to hope that a trio of youthful compositional talent will continue their exciting development without too much of a slavish appetite for cheap Hollywood ‘straight to DVD’ pastiche:

All have much, much more than that to offer.

Iwan Fox