It is unusual for an album to take the shortest piece on the programme
as its title track, but here it is poignantly apt. Kenneth Downie's
gentle and touching arrangement of the hymn tune In
Perfect Peace is at the heart of this
album and acts as something of a threnody for the late Bengt Eklund
and the band that he created. He was the onlie begetter of the
Göteborg Brass Band. In 1982, in fulfillment of a long held ambition,
he pulled together a talented group of brass players - mostly
students from the Academy of Music and Drama in Göteborg where
Eklund was professor of trumpet, together with some professionals
and enthusiastic amateurs - to create one of the finest brass
bands in the world. This is not hyperbole - the band won the Brass
Band World Championship in Brisbane in 1988. In 2006, after a
quarter of a century of touring, contesting and concertising with
the band, Eklund was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He passed
away on 30 March 2007. The Göteborg Brass Band traveled to the
UK a month later to record this album in his memory and compete
in their final European Brass Band Championships before disbanding
once and for all. You can read more about the band's all too short
history on its homepage.
This album is a tribute and a farewell. It opens with a classic of
the brass band repertoire: William Rimmer's march, Ravenswood. The booklet notes reveal that the band used this march as a concert
curtain raiser for many years. Their performance here is sleek
and stylish and resists the temptation to blare.
Three of the album's four solo turns follow, each amply displaying
the talents of the band’s section leaders. Principal cornet,
Tone Fossum Olsson, plays Ivor Boskano's arrangement of Joy
Webb's Share My Yoke with a full, liquid tone
and subtle vibrato. It sounds as though she it thinking the
lyrics of the song as she plays the notes, and she is sensitively
supported by the band. This is very moving music making. The
bass trombone solo, Sång Till Lotta,
is another lyrical number and is beautifully shaped by Clare
Farr.
If Olsson's and Farr's solos emphasise lyrical qualities, the other
two are more concerned with sparkle. The
Striped Falcon was written for
the band's principal euphonium, Patrick Randefalk, and its
title is a play on the meaning of his surname. It is a delightful
number, bouncing with jaunty syncopations and showcasing Randefalk's
manual dexterity and the sweetness of his tone at the top
of his range. Later, Mattias Ekberg dances through Ernst Sachse's
modest Concertino in E flat. The accompanying band is pared
down to ten here, as per the original 1871 scoring, making
for transparent textures.
In a nod to the history of brass bands, the album includes an arrangement
of a piece from the classical mainstream. Nigel Harvey's adept
arrangement of the overture to The
Marriage of Figaro is stylishly
played here, with plenty of dynamic contrast and tight ensemble
playing bringing out all that is delightful in Mozart's score.
The disc concludes with two major works recorded live in the white
heat of competition.
Göteborg was one of four bands to select Philip Sparke’s Music of the Spheres as its own choice
for last year’s European Brass Band Championships. The piece
is full of vicious passage work, dangerously exposed solo
writing, sharp dynamic contrasts and jolting syncopations
and changes of meter, laced with passages of beautiful melodic
writing. Sparke has written some wonderful test pieces over
the years - The Year of the Dragon
is a favourite of mine - and this
one is certainly representative of his best work in the genre.
Technically challenging though it may be, it sounds like the
band really enjoys playing Music
of the Spheres. Christopher Thomas commented favourably on their performance in his
report
from the championships and the
power of their reading is amply evident on disc. The opening
statement on solo tenor horn has a mysterious, veiled quality,
before the band bursts into declamatory flame. The wistful
beauty of the episode entitled The
Lonely Planet is also beautifully
caught. The final peroration is explosive. I have not heard
the studio recording of this piece made by the YBS Band, but
this live recording is more polished than the admirably expressive
performance given by Waratah Brass at the 2005 Australian
National Brass Band Championships (MM2-016).
The final track is the band’s triumphant performance of Kenneth Downie’s
St Magnus,
with which the band won the New Zealand Brass Band Championships
in 2005, the first band from the Northern Hemisphere to do
so. Doyen’s careful remastering cannot improve on the deficiencies
of the original analogue tape on which this performance was
caught. The sound perspective is shallow and distant when
compared to the digital recordings that precede it, cloudy
for the lower end of the band (euphoniums, baritones and tubas)
and skewed towards the percussion. Still, the sonic deficiencies
are is worth enduring to hear this superb performance under
Eklund's baton. St Magnus follows a similar path to Downie's earlier Purcell Variations, though here he states the theme without
preamble before bending and refracting it in the build up
to a majestic conclusion.
The booklet is well presented, with a couple of brief notes about the
band and a short profile of Bengt Eklund, and brief but useful
commentary on the repertoire. I take exception to the inclusion
– again – of the unnecessarily discursive biography of Dr. Nicholas Childs,
which exceeds in length the booklet's combined information on
the Göteborg Brass Band and their late founder.
Rather than end on that note, let me return to the album's title track.
Downie's arrangement of In Perfect
Peace is simply gorgeous - a perfect riposte to any claim that a brass band
cannot produce sound of varied colour and warmth. Downie's arrangement
is built on progressive harmonies and pianissimo blending of parts,
contrasting the warmth of euphoniums, tenor horns and baritones
with the more direct projection of cornets and trombones. The
Göteborg Brass Band bring to their performance of this piece the
same qualities that they bring to all of the music on this disc:
a true ensemble sound with a warmth that does not rely on corporate
vibrato and a soft edge to their louder playing. These qualities
make the sound of the band distinctive. It is a sound we will
not hear again.
Tim Perry
