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Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Since its founding in 1985, the Dallas Wind Symphony, led by Artistic Director and Conductor Jerry Junkin, has become one of the world’s top professional wind ensembles, providing a standard against which other bands measure excellence. Soaring lyricism, especially in the solo trumpet part, characterizes each of the three richly scored lyrical sections of Fisher Tull’s Rhapsody for Trumpet and Band (1980), which surround two faster, more technically demanding portions of the work. Harry Begian (1921-2010) created the transcription of the first movement of Reinhold Glière’s Concerto for Coloratura Soprano for a 1983 University of Illinois Symphonic Band concert. The movement is characteristically Russian, full of long, brooding phrases juxtaposed against upwardly spinning melodies. Receiving its world premiere recording, Brett William Dietz’s Redshift is full of color, contrast and fast-paced drama. The work contains a great amount of interplay between the trumpet soloist and ensemble, and prominently features the percussion section. Two additional works, Rachmaninov’s Vocalise and a second by Fisher Tull (Concerto No. 2 for Trumpet and Band), round out this disc.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

The Eastern Wind Symphony present a program of 20th century works for winds, including Vincent Persichetti’s Serenade, op. 85 and Joaquin Rodrigo’s first work for winds, the 1966 Adagio. +The Eastern Wind Symphony’s professional members are accomplished and talented musicians who volunteer their time and talents to present the best in wind symphony repertoire. +Artistic Director Todd Nichols and Assistant Conductor Adam Warshafsky currently guide the ensemble.

Experience some of the world's most beautiful music, as performed by the U.S. Air Force Band, Col. Lowell E. Graham, Commander/Conductor. This album, the third in a series highlighting the art of transcription, displays all of the color, passion and flair that have made these musical works concert favorites. Featuring works by Emmanuel Chabrier, Jules Massenet, Camille Saint-Saëns, Claude Debussy, Jacques Ibert and Maurice Ravel.

Recorded in 2006 and 2008 in Leamy Hall Auditorium and the U.S Coast Guard Academy, the Coast Guard Band under conductor Cap. Kenneth Megan presents American Journeys. The CD features compositions from American composers Williams, Gould, Daugherty, King, Grantham, Buckley and Cheetham.

Classical Music

Classical Music

October swiftly approaches, and what Oktoberfest celebration is complete without celebratory, often raucous, music? for the perfect complement to your stein of Spaten, horn of Hefeweizen, or glass of Gerst, turn to this fabulous release by first rate 15-piece brass ensemble D'Wyn Mugge.

Classical Music

Footlifters: A Century of American Marches

An unusually intriguing program. There is no better wind band curtain-raiser than Vaughan Williams's Toccata marziale, and his Variations for brass is from his 'autumn' years, boldly harmonized and dark hued.

Telarc may well have spoiled us forever with their exceptional recordings of this marvellous band. CBS miss something of the bloom, the ripeness and range of the sonorities with their tighter and drier imaging. But it's a harsh comparison on which to start and I wouldn't want to discourage you from investigating an unusually intriguing programme. There is, of course, no better wind band curtain-raiser than Vaughan Williams's Toccata marziale, a classic of its kind, despatched here with all due regimental swagger, but I have returned already to Donald Hunsberger's expanded scoring of the richly inventive Variations for brass band. Here's a piece from Vaughan Williams's 'autumn' years, boldly harmonized and dark hued, bearing something of Percy Grainger's celtic bleakness in its moments of solitude. The low brasses are generously accommodated (and tellingly supported here by string bass and harp), there are piccolo trumpets and flugelhorns, indeed the whole gamut of possibility on offer from the contemporary American wind band. This is a beautifully made scoring from one who plainly knows his forces from the inside.

For the rest, we've the baby brother of Hindemith's Symphony for concert band—his earlier Konzertmusik for wind: an edgy, slightly sinister mix of poker-faced military gestures and an almost enforced Weillian jazziness shot through with Hindemith's dry, characteristically academic counterpoints. Each to his own. Karel Husa's Music for Prague 1968 is essentially a dramatic colour piece, a cry from the heart for a lost homeland, full of obvious Nationalistic symbols: a recurrent bird-call (symbol of liberty), an old Hussite war-song (symbol of resistance), feverish climaxes built upon fanfares of distress, bells of alarm and victory remembered from the ancient Czech capital's countless church towers. What counts here is impact, visceral impact, and Husa's musical engineering is entirely geared to just that.

-- Gramophone [11/1989]

Rossini: Il Barbiere di Siviglia nella trascrizione per Harm

Classical Music

NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY WIND SYMPHONY: Symphonic Band Mu

This music is intriguing – rich and strange indeed.

The American composer Deon Nielsen Price studied with Leslie Bassett and Samuel Adler. She has been active in various academic bodies in West Coast universities. She has written extensively and with distinction in relation to her instrument, the piano. Her catalogue of compositions is substantial.

The pieces featured here are recorded at a higher level than usual and every detail emerges close-up and vivid.

Yellow Jade Banquet sports super-clear textures and lines. Impressions flood in: an excited squeal, an enchanting undulation, an Oriental swerve, a hint of chant and seductively inspirational pulses suggestive of minimalism - which this writing is not. Hovhaness, McPhee, Cowell and Lou Harrison are perhaps influences on this composer.

The macabre Epitaphs for Fallen Heroes induces awe. There is something of the ceremony in this piece with its stonily resonant and hieratically assertive piano part. The Dies Irae and angular dissonance are confidently mixed. Take this as a sort of Bergian-surreal successor to Liszt’s Totentanz.

America Themes is a phantasmagoria of American traditional tunes with Johnny comes marching home melting into Taps and thence to Copland and so on. The composer affectionately continues a tradition made resilient by Ives and keeps the ear constantly beguiled by each transition.

Gateways is a gritty, rhetorical and tough work for wind band. It is inspired by life’s paths that step off the way or onward through gateways. It is as much about the paths as the gateways themselves, we are told.

States of Mind is a work in four movements: Meditation, Troubled Thoughts, Mysterious Dream, Transformation. The first is a tender essay redolent of Barber at his most gentle. Troubled Thoughts thrusts thorny angles into the pottage and its stinging poignancy sears and scars in a way suggestive of Schnittke. Mysterious Dream moves from dank meditation to free-wheeling surreal visions. Transformation has a serrated Shostakovich-like determination and some stunning headlong pizzicato passages. The fugal flavour of some of the writing was irritating - a very personal prejudice.

Dancing on the Brink of the World is much in the same exotic vein - a sort of time-travelling fantasy from the Yelamu autochthons of Crissy Field to Hispanic incursion and onwards from the internment of Japanese Americans to a tribute in retrospect to the ancient cultures. It’s a rich brew of whooping energy, bristling and chirruping, ratchet and rattle, groaning brass redolent of Hovhaness and dancing vitality. A smoochy soft shoe dance is made the more intriguing by a high and anxiously buzzing repeated figure from the violins. Fragments and musical units are in constant motion like an inspirational kaleidoscope of the emotions and of inventive imagery. The effect in this work’s dazzle of consciousness is something like a pellucid version of Grainger’s Warriors. The work ends with the foghorn in the Bay.

This disc is a successor to Cambria’s first Deon Nielsen Price CD (CD-1170) which included To the Children of War, song-cycle for voice and piano; Diversions; Crossroads for trio; L'Alma Jubilo (The Jubilant Soul), for solo guitar; Big Sur Triptych, for soprano saxophone and piano: (Sea Otters; Redwoods; Crags); Hexachord: View from Malibu; and Three Faces of Kim, the Napalm Girl, for alto and soprano saxophones and piano.

The notes are quite full but fail to tell me things like the composer’s year of birth and exactly where Crissy Field is.

This music is intriguing - rich and strange indeed. Very Californian in the freewheeling accommodation it strikes with the Pacific Rim and with history.

-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International 

“Workshop works, to keep the right hand, freed from the baton, from dozing off too soon” is how Richard Strauss understatedly described his masterly output following his final 1942 opera “Capriccio”, including his two Sonatinas for 16 winds. Members of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra founded the armonia Bläserensemble in 2000. The ensemble’s repertoire ranges from Trio d’Anches and classical wind quintets to Mozart, Dvorák and Richard Strauss.

Christopher Shultis: Devisadero (Music from the New Mexico W