Pavane’s stunning booklet features three colour
photographs from different angles of a work by Alexander Ketele.
This gleaming tripartite sculpture resembles a burnished brass
heart fractured obliquely by a vicious stump of girder. It’s
lucky that it is so photogenic because there’s not a word about
the music, the composers, the performances or anything very
coherent about the performers – though there is a poem ("Arches
and curves/Lie willing and ready..") in four languages
vaguely correlating brass instruments and sex. Harry Mortimer
would have been delighted.
Which leaves us with just our ears. This is
a conspectus of originals and arrangements ranging from Scheidt
to van Landeghem and MacDonald. Scheidt’s Battle Suite is a
splendid evocation; authenticists will object to the relative
opulence of the Quintet’s sonorities but others will thrill,
as ever, to Scheidt’s drama and life force – not least in the
excellent Canzon Bergamasque <sample 1>. The Grieg Suite
is a pleasant diversion and receives a somewhat non-committal
performance whilst Gordon Jacob’s Changing Moods belongs to
his relatively fertile late period, from the last six years
of his long life. His opening movement, Ceremonial, is baroque
in spirit, and the Quintet employ some good control of dynamics.
Nostalgic is the name Jacob gave to the second movement and
it has the feel of a carol with pleasing ascending lines; in
the fourth, final movement the near nonagenarian throws out
brass layering, jazzy accelerandos, and his indelible joyful
spirit <sample 2>. It sounds beautifully written for brass
quintet. In Ian MacDonald’s Sea Sketches we can feel the salty
brine – the first of this three movement suite is essentially
nineteenth century in spirit which contrasts well with the succeeding
devotional rapt concentration of the charmingly named Sunset
shanty. Frigyes Hidas, Budapest born in 1928, contributes a
rollickingly good little piece of no pretensions and we are
spared some clarion blare in the Rimsky, nicely re-titled on
the disc The flight of the tuba bee. It’s the least aggressive
and accent-heavy flight you could wish for. Van Landeghem was
born in Temse in 1954 and Carpe Diem is harmonically by far
the most complex piece on the disc – indeed almost disconcertingly
so. A multi-sectional barely six minute work it gains in momentum
and complexity gathering itself for the final moments with acuity
and sure musical intent <sample 3>. A thought-provoking
finale to a recital of some incidental pleasures.
Jonathan Woolf
European Brass Quintet
