Empire Brass has to be one of the foremost brass
ensembles in the world. Their playing is precise, stimulating
and always entertaining. The nucleus of the ensemble first
met at Tanglewood, Massachusetts, at the annual summer
school pioneered by Serge Koussevitsky then the chief conductor
of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Originally called the Berkshire
Music Centre it developed to become the premier musical festival
and educational forum in the eastern USA. It focused on instruction
in conducting, composition, opera and instrumental performance.
Leonard Bernstein was probably their most famous alumnus.
In fact, Bernstein was one of the composers to receive commissions
from Empire Brass. According to their web page the five brass
players have all, at one time or another, been members of
some of the leading US
orchestras. As an ensemble they perform over one hundred recitals
all over the world including playing 'to standing-room only
crowds in the former Soviet Union where their concerts were
broadcast on television'. They are the first brass ensemble
to be chosen as winners of the acclaimed Naumberg Chamber
Music Award, have been the faculty-quintet-in-residence at
Boston University for at least 13 years and have held 'the
Empire Brass Seminar’ at the University Tanglewood Institute
for over 20 years ..... [where] students from around the world
.... come to study’. For the last fifteen years they have
also acted as visiting-consultants-in-brass at London's Royal Academy of Music.
So what about this album? It is not perfect. It
excels in the more rambunctious pieces, the marches and up-tempo
numbers like the 'Procession of the Nobles' from Mlada and
the 'Great Gate of Kiev' from Pictures at an Exhibition. In
the legato excerpts, however, the music is far better suited
to the versions we are already familiar with, namely those
comprising strings and woodwinds. 'Anitra's Dance' from Grieg's
Peer Gynt and Copland's 'Simple Gifts' are examples of the
latter. Oddly enough, despite playing of dazzling sprightliness,
both Dvořák's 'Slavonic Dance no. 8' and Brahms' 'Hungarian
Dance No. 5' also sound better in their original settings.
Certainly the two Pavanes (by Ravel and Fauré) would have
been better left alone.
But there are still plenty of positives. Rolf Smedvig's
solo trumpet - one presumes that is who it is ... we are not
told in the cover notes - in Smetana's 'Dance of the Comedians'
from The Bartered Bride is faultless and the ensemble's cohesiveness
and tightness is equally superb.
Randolph Magri-Overend
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