One of several remarkable
facts about John Pickard’s epic Gaia
Symphony is that it very nearly
failed to come into being. Pickard had
in fact conceived the idea of a large-scale
work of related pieces following the
composition of the two earliest parts
of the symphony, Wildfire and
Men of Stone. These two initially
stand-alone pieces were written for
the National Youth Brass Band of Wales
as long ago as 1991 and 1995 respectively.
Yet following their first performances
a lack of subsequent airings led the
composer to the conclusion that there
was insufficient interest in his music
for brass band and that it would not
be worth expanding them into something
more substantial.
Consequently it was
not until 2001 that the idea came back
to Pickard following a telephone call
from Robert Childs expressing an interest
in completion of the project. Pickard
was quickly appointed as the band’s
Composer-in-Residence and work re-started.
Shortly after this they recorded the
first two parts of the Symphony
with Wildfire being released
on a Doyen CD in 2002 (review).
Pickard completed the opening movement
of the Symphony, Tsunami,
in 2002 with the final movement, Aurora,
following a year later.
Immediately following
the composition of Wildfire and
Men of Stone Pickard had identified
certain thematic relationships between
them although, as he explains in his
informative insert notes, he was later
faced with the dilemma of how he was
to link the four pieces in a manner
that would lend the complete work the
degree of collective cohesion he wished
to achieve. Initial thoughts of electronics
depicting the "natural" elements
of rain and wind were soon abandoned
in favour of three interludes scored
for percussion only. It was an idea
that served the double purpose of relieving
the listener’s ear from the sonority
of the brass instruments; a kind of
palette cleanser, as well as relieving
the player’s embouchures given the extreme
physical stamina needed to perform the
work as an entity.
The fact that the stamina
required for a complete live performance
can be summoned was borne out by The
Buy As You View Band at the 2005 Cheltenham
Festival when they gave a complete performance
to considerable critical acclaim.
If the band were in
the kind of form at the Cheltenham Festival
that they show here it must indeed have
been some event, for their playing is
of a magnificent standard. Technically
assured as well as hugely involving
and exciting, the band also demonstrates
a range of colour and textural subtlety
that is a credit both to the players
and to Pickard’s scoring which shows
an impressive understanding of the generally
underestimated tonal variety of the
brass band.
Tsunami was
written in 2001/02 but the music has
an all too real sense of the present
in the wake of the disaster on Boxing
Day 2005. Eye witnesses of the Indonesian
tsunami talked of the tide being sucked
away from the shore in the minutes before
the wave hit, a sign of what was to
come for those that had been unfortunate
enough to have witnessed previous tsunamis.
Thus Pickard imbues the music with a
sense of foreboding whilst allowing
its energy to gradually drain away through
the first third of the piece until a
central section of uneasy calm featuring
solos from several instruments. In the
wake of this build-up the final climax
is of shattering power and an eerie
flash-back to the horrors of the television
pictures witnessed by us all so recently.
The first "window"
Water-Fire (played with admirable
panache and virtuosity by the band’s
percussion section) moves attacca into
another depiction of the power of nature,
albeit this time possibly as a result
of man’s carelessness. The music had
in fact already been started when the
composer read a newspaper report of
a forest fire in North Wales in which
two fires started separately before
converging on each other. Although not
a precise depiction of the fire the
music emerges from the crackling and
flickering of its opening to progress
through a series of powerful climaxes
before burning itself out into an extraordinary
clattering of wooden percussion. At
several points during Wildfire
it struck me that Pickard is possibly
familiar with the brass band music of
John McCabe with several passages reminiscent
of Cloudcatcher Fells amongst
others. It has to be said however that
Pickard never allows the music to descend
into the derivative.
Aurora comes
in stark relief after the devastation
of the opening two pieces. As the title
implies, the music is a depiction of
the Aurora Borealis, concentrating on
extensive solo work for most of the
band with instrumental lines entwining
themselves around each other in music
of shimmering, transparent beauty. The
ensuing percussion window, Air-Earth,
is equally delicate, quietly allowing
the music to melt into the hushed picture
of Avebury stone circle that opens Men
of Stone.
Men of Stone
is really a suite in its own right,
the four clear sections each picturing
an ancient site captured at specific
times of day. Hence Avebury is seen
during the Autumn, early in the morning
(more echoes of McCabe here, clearly
so in the cornets at 2:00), Castlerigg
stone circle in Cumbria is pictured
during a snow storm on a winter’s afternoon,
Barclodiad-y-Gawres, a prehistoric burial
site on Anglesey on a spring evening
and the glory of Stonehenge during a
summer night as dawn emerges through
the stones. Barclodiad-y-Gawres is particularly
beautiful before the radiance of dawn
at Stonehenge transforms the closing
bars into a paean of triumph and spectacle.
Throughout the Symphony
it is impossible to fault the commitment
and vitality that both band and director
bring to this music. John Pickard must
be a happy man indeed that his at one
time seemingly impossible task has resulted
in a work that has broken new boundaries
in the brass band repertoire. The recording
too is both lifelike and appropriately
spectacular in its dynamic range.
These days it is a
rare thing that a brass band work and
recording come along that break completely
new territory. In John Pickard’s Gaia
Symphony, coupled with the playing
of the Buy As You View Band, we have
just such a milestone.
Christopher Thomas
Links
http://www.johnpickard.co.uk/page6.html
http://www.bardic-music.com/Pickard.htm
http://www.bris.ac.uk/music/staff/jp/
Buy As You View Band/Robert Childs 
