Posted on by Richard Dove

Shining brass

Photo: Richard Dove
RICHARD DOVE is blown away by an ambitious brass ensemble

A Saturday morning concert always puts a spring in my step, particularly when the sun is shining and the venue is the ancient barn at Pilsdon in West Malling. This is the second day of the ever ambitious annual Music@Malling festival. Cups of coffee and tea and custard creams are being consumed as we listen to the fast-rising young quintet Connaught Brass tune their gleaming instruments. They arrived in the early hours after a trek across the country following a concert in Wales. Despite this they look fresh-faced and eager.

They stand in a semi-circle – tuba, horn, trombone and two trumpets. Elliot Carter’s arrangement of Purcell’s Fantasia on One Note sets the tone for a wonderfully varied repertoire. It is explained that Carter thought the one note was underdone and so this 20th century composer put his own slant on this Baroque piece. Indeed, we bounce between Baroque and the 20th century throughout the programme.

The interplay is stunning as the trumpeters take the lead and the tuba takes the pulse of the piece. After a resonant Vivaldi Concerto in F Major we move to unmistakable Leonard Bernstein and one of his final compositions, Dance Suite. These are brass vignettes with a quirky, bouncing, exuberant character which match the zest and energy of the ensemble.

Then, a surprise; the musicians move to all four corners of the barn to replicate Giovanni Gabrielli’s surround sound textures in St Mark’s, Venice. I stare at the high timbered ceiling as the sound merges and seemingly floats. This is virtuosity with imagination and a dash of daring.

We are transported from Venice to New York with Gershwin’s Three Preludes – a slice of Manhattan in West Malling. With their jazz traditions it is evident that Gershwin and Bernstein relish the sounds of brass and exploit the range of the instruments to the upmost. The mood changes with Dowland’s Flow My Tears, and this glorious melancholy embraces the Barn. How could such a varied programme be concluded? Well, the Connaughts deliver a magnificent finale with trombonist Will Foster’s arrangement of Kurt Weill’s Threepennny Opera. It has spoken interjections, piccolo trumpet, flugelhorn, multiple muted sounds (muting a tuba involves a very elaborate contraption) and even a pause for a custard cream as one trumpeter soloist seemingly gives up the struggle and wanders to the back of the barn. They first performed the piece at the Lucerne Festival where the guiding theme was “Crazy.”

The sheer verve of the playing just makes one smile with wonder and astonishment. It is evident why this chamber group won first prize in the inaugural Philip Jones International Brass Ensemble Competition. After a Gershwin encore they stride purposefully out of the barn as the applause resonates. We have all witnessed something very special and it’s not even lunchtime.  As we head out, the musicians are all sitting around a picnic table chatting. Friendship and virtuosity is a winning formula. Do keep a watch out for Connaught Brass.

Posted on by Stuart Millson

“Music for a while, shall all your cares beguile”

STUART MILLSON can hear Restoration London from 21st century Kent

Music@Malling, planned and organised by classical musician and educator, Thomas Kemp, is one of those provincially-based, smaller festivals which succeeds in bringing performers of national and international standing to local and semi-rural settings. So, instead of having to travel to Kings Place, Wigmore Hall, or St. James, Piccadilly for the pleasure of hearing the finest chamber music, discerning audiences in a mid-Kent community need only stroll to their local church, or the modern performance space of the Norman-built Malling Abbey to savour baroque bands such as Fretwork, who gave Music@Malling’s lunchtime concert on Wednesday 28th September.
With thoughts of the succession of the modern monarchy still fresh in our minds, Fretwork transported us to the candlelit rooms of Restoration England – to the great, collective release of breath and creativity that followed the crumbling of Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the return of the ‘Merry Monarch’. It was the great Henry Purcell of William and Mary fame, and the sometimes overlooked Matthew Locke (who possibly taught that renowned composer) who together gave voice to this other, long-before-Elgar English musical renascence. Fretwork’s Malling Abbey tribute to them could not have been more all-encompassing, because although only a group numbering five players and performing just sequences of fantasias, the choice of works somehow captured, perfectly, the authentic soul and sound of the composers and their age. If one representative musical fragment of an epoch could survive, the cadences of those intimate Fantasias would suffice.
Purcell’s immense creativity, packed into his remarkably short life (1659-1695), was legendary; like an English Mozart, a stream of work flowed, with Fretwork giving us an example of this impossible productivity, in the form of Fantasias 8 (in D minor) and No. 9 (in A minor) written on consecutive days. The trait of English melancholia, which would surface again some three centuries later in Vaughan Williams, Britten and Alexander Goehr (the latter earning a place in Fretwork’s programme) is clearly audible in Purcell’s music, but perhaps less so in Matthew Locke’s Consort of Four Parts No. 3, who allowed more of the spirit of the boisterous bourrée into his music, but still tempering his lighter touch, with the reflection of the sentimental saraband.

Alexander Goehr. Photo: Etan Tal. Wikimedia Commons

In his introduction to the concert, Festival organiser, Thomas Kemp, spoke of Purcell’s music as “harmonically complex for the period in which it was written”. Yet contemporary composer, Alexander Goehr, writing in an age of deliberately difficult atonality, decided to reach back to the general harmonies of Purcell’s time in his own Fantasias, written for Fretwork in 2000. Goehr’s music may be seen as Purcell through a modern prism (like Britten’s absorption of Dowland) and yet the Fantasia No. 2 for Five Viols begins with an abrupt phrase – a jolt, or disturbance in the autumnal English landscape, confirming Goehr as no purveyor of pastiche, but a composer in the continuum stretching back to Purcell and Locke’s time.
Ancient and modern were reconciled not just in the music. Fretwork’s music-stands held, not paper scores, but digital devices on whose screens were displayed the staves and notes of the 17th century. It was a fitting touch at this most memorable recital.