Music review: Concert and Symphonic Bands
Bands hone their repertoire during an amiable evening
ByPeter Jacobi
October 11, 2007
To each was allotted a half at the Musical Arts Center on Tuesday evening, the first to the Concert Band, the other to the Symphonic, and for each, the time — about 45 minutes — proved sufficient to show that the process of assimilation within these ensembles is well under way for so early in the new season, the new school year.
The more senior, the Symphonic Band, playing for an impressive new hire, Patrick Casey, sounded particularly collected and connected during its diverse lineup of five 20th-century pieces, chosen to test skills of flexibility, sonority and togetherness.
A pair of overtures were among the highlights, a festive one written in the 1930s by Germaine Tailleferre, the only woman in the influential set of French composers referred to as Les Six, for an opera that never materialized, and the other Dimitry Kabalevsky’s brash, bright Overture to “Colas Breugnon.” Melancholy pervaded an impressionistic “Autumn Walk” by the late American composer Julian Work, a mood the band redolently captured. Gregory Youtz, currently on the faculty of Pacific Lutheran University, contributed “Scherzo for a Bitter Moon,” and bitter this musical moon seemed to be, as expressed in eerie sounds from the high woodwinds as well as builds to shattering climaxes.
But for this listener, the highlight of the Symphonic Band’s portion of the concert was a beautifully etched and orotund reading of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ grand Variations for Wind Band, with its uplifting theme and dramatic extensions thereof.
Though one heard occasional lapses in the work of the Concert Band, conductor Paul Popiel had his assemblage both attentive and responsive during a quintet of rigorous assignments, these again all compositions of the century just past.
Most challenging perhaps was Darius Milhaud’s Suite Francaise, written in 1945 to reflect on the French/American alliance in World War II, this via evocative aural paintings of regions where in France the Allied forces fought. Popiel and company caught their flavors and mastered their varying complexities.
Also on the band’s bill of fare were David Maslanka’s spacious “Mother Earth (A Fanfare)”; Morten Lauridsen’s lovely musical bouquet, “Contre Qui,” inspired by a poem about roses by the mystical Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke; and a Galop from a Shostakovich operetta, “Moscow, Cheremushky,” which galloped famously, thanks to score and performance.
A master’s candidate in wind conducting, Pamela Holt, came forth at midpoint to confidently lead the Concert Band in Carolyn Bremer’s “Early Light,” an oblique, fractured, hard-to-recognize, but still entertaining salute to “The Star Spangled Banner,” prompted by her memories of ballgames attended in childhood.
The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music would like
to thank the Herald Times for permission to republish this review.
