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Brass QuintetsCenter City Brass Quintet
Quintet - Malcolm Arnold (b. 1921) |
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Program Notes The Center City Brass Quintet takes its name from the famous downtown district of Philadelphia in which it was formed in 1985 by five students at the Curtis Institute of Music. While at Curtis, the group coached with such distinguished musicians as Mason Jones, Myron Bloom, and Felix Galimir, and took top prizes at the Coleman, Carmel, and New York Brass Conference competitions. After performing in many concerts at Curtis and throughout the region, including numerous live broadcasts on radio and television in Philadelphia and New York, the five members of the ensemble went on to establish their own individual careers and assume positions in orchestras throughout the United States. However, they resolved to keep the quintet active, and have done so by continuing to perform as their schedules permit, and by this, their debut recording. Brass Quintets After a golden age in Renaissance Venice, climaxing with the antiphonal church music of Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, the custom of composing for an ensemble of brass instruments went out of fashion. To be sure, the 'Turmmusiker' (tower musicians) continued to serenade German towns with chorales from on high, but it was not until the mid nineteenth century that Hector Berlioz brought massed brass back into the concert hall. A few decades after that, the notion of a quintet of brass instruments as a subtle and colorful medium for chamber music began to take hold. By the middle of the twentieth century, the brass quintet could claim a place alongside the string quartet and the woodwind quintet as a chamber genre with a rich history and repertoire. The present recording brings together six landmark works of that history, beginning, appropriately enough, with a composer who cites Berlioz as his most important influence. The prolific English composer Malcolm Arnold (born 1921) has stood somewhat apart from the fashions and trends of twentieth-century music, cultivating a brilliant and dramatic style in numerous media, including concertos, symphonies, and many chamber and vocal works. He has written over eighty film scores including The Bridge on the River Kwai, for which he won the Academy Award in 1957. Arnold's Quintet (composed in 1960) begins with an 'Allegro vivace' that contrasts a brilliant figure, introduced by the trumpets in tail-chasing imitation, with a rather taciturn chorale phrase; at mid-movement these two are combined and set dancing. The chaconne originated as a rather melancholy Spanish dance, taking the form of variations on a brief theme in a stately 3/4 rhythm, and reached its greatest flowering in music by Purcell, Handel, and Bach; the brooding counterpoint of Arnold's 'Chaconne' produces some intensely expressive dissonances that recall even earlier composers such as Monteverdi. The finale, marked 'con brio', is a hilarious mini-rondo that jumbles together jazz and the music hall, and always manages to snatch its little march tune from the jaws of chaos. The German tradition of brass playing took root in Russia after Peter The Great brought German scientists and engineers to Russia in the eighteenth century. The Russian-born Viktor Ewald (1860-1935) followed in his family tradition and became a professor at the Institute of Civil Engineering in St Petersburg, all the while playing cello at quartet evenings and becoming friends with the likes of Mussorgsky and Rimsky Korsakov. The latter had been a military band leader, and no doubt encouraged Ewald (who also played horn) to compose at least three brass quintets. Ewald's love of Russian folk songs - he made expeditions deep into the countryside to collect them -provided him with ample material in the Russian nationalist style, notably the principal themes of his Quintet No.1 in B-flat minor. The chamber music of Robert Schumann, the German Romantic composer most admired by progressive Russians of that era, is the model for this piece's vigorous counterpoint, volatile moods, lyricism, and classic form. In another case of cultural cross-fertilization, a French composer of Italian heritage, Eugene Bozza (1905 1991), came to Paris from the sunny Mediterranean city of Nice, studied violin and conducting at the Conservatoire, and then embarked on a career as one of this century's leading composers for woodwind and brass. The carefree Paris of the 1920s, of Stravinsky and Les Six, gave Bozza all the melodiousness and wit he needed to fashion music that was both sparkling, idiomatic for the instruments, and challenging to the player. (Some of his works were written as test pieces for competitions.) The wide emotional range among the movements of his 1951 Sonatine - sassy in the first, dirge-like in the second, ironic at the end - recalls Poulenc. One can only guess why the grotesque final march is prefaced by quotations from Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony and Ravel's ballet Ma Mere l'Oye. Born in Potsdam, the German violinist Ludwig Maurer (1789 - 1878) found employment in Russia for most of his long career. He toured as a performer, directed opera companies in Hamburg and St Petersburg, and composed a symphony, several operas, and chamber music. His violin concertos are known for virtuoso technique that anticipated Paganini but his Three Pieces for Brass Quintet have an equanimity and grace that are more like Mendelssohn. Ingolf Dahl (1912 - 1970) was born in Hamburg, Germany to Swedish-German parents, and lived in the United States after 1938. A professor at the University of Southern California from 1945 until his death, Dahl tirelessly performed and organized concerts of new music in the Los Angeles area, and produced a relatively small number of meticulously-crafted compositions himself. Composed in 1944, the Music for Brass Instruments comes rather early in his output, and reflects his close friendship with Stravinsky in its lean counterpoint. It is also an homage to J. S. Bach, taking as its starting point a chorale closely associated with the German master, 'Christ Lay in the Bonds of Death'. The opening fantasy strikingly de-and re-constructs the chorale. Dahl then turns to his adopted country, stirring up a jaunty 'Intermezzo' from pentatonic bits of 'cowboy' tunes. The closing 'Fugue' has the best of both worlds: passages of Bach-inspired counterpoint, and the clear diatonic harmonies, broad melody, and snappy rhythms typical of American symphonic composers in the 1940s. To be a Canadian is a cultural encounter in itself, and Ontario-born Morley Calvert (1928 - 1991( worked as a bandmaster, choral director, and high-school teacher in French-speaking Montreal for much of his career. He composed extensively for band, brass quintet, and chorus. In 1961, at the request of the Montreal Brass Quintet, Calvert composed a Suite based on French-Canadian folk songs, subtitling it From the Monteregian Hills after the line of mountains that extends south from Mount Royal in the city to the U.S. border. This Suite has become a staple of the brass repertoire, thanks to its combination of Gaelic wit (a merry march for openers, and concluding with a jazzy take on the Christmas carol Il est nŽ, le divin enfant) and Anglo-American sentiment especially in the spacious 'Chanson Melancholique'. David Wright
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