Imposing geographical vistas and darkened psychological landscapes of the mind provided the core of the RNCM Brass Band’s engaging contribution to the festival weekend.

First came the splashes of Basque-country colour with the vibrant excitement of Ravel’s ‘Alborado del Grazioso’. Led with flamboyant elegance by James Gourlay it was delivered with dashing carnival vigour - all twirling gestures, dancing jesters and juicy boisterousness.   

Peculiar vigour

Music that also had a very peculiar vigour followed. Derek Bourgeois’ ‘The Forest of Dean’ is a portrait of the ancient area of Gloucestershire that to this day retains its air of cabbalistic mystery and occasional mayhem.

Each of the six-linked variations based on a theme of Herbert Howells (who was born locally in Lydney) were developed with an insistent, expressionistic oddness – from the dark and sardonic to the longing and gentle.   

Neurosis

Dark thoughts of troubling psychology were explored with Lucy Pankhurst’s ‘Mindscapes’; an ‘introspective self-portrait’ that was a soliloquy of fragmentary abstracts and anxieties interspersed by moments of calm. 

It was an absorbing musical neurosis; incessantly claustrophobic but equally free thinking.

Dark thoughts of troubling psychology were explored with Lucy Pankhurst’s ‘Mindscapes’; an ‘introspective self-portrait’ that was a soliloquy of fragmentary abstracts and anxieties interspersed by moments of calm.

Festival Artistic Director Paul Hindmarsh has been a particular champion of the music of Wilfred Heaton – a man of deep personal complexities. These saw him revisit much of his limited compositional output time and time again like a man forever contemplating his feelings of enigmatic inadequacy. 

Gossamer

The aching beauty of his meditative ‘Lento’ was a case in point; originally written for inclusion in a piano sonata that originated from a four movement suite for orchestra that was in itself elaborated from a work for brass. 

Whatever its provenance the subtle shadings and contours, like complex threads of gossamer, (superbly realised in Hindmarsh’s arrangement) sunk deep into the consciousness. 

A classic piece of mature Eric Ball brought things to a close, with the transparent religious symbolism of ‘High Peak’ – played with a sense of both adventure and gritty determination, from the vision of the foothills to the triumph of glorious attainment.     

Iwan Fox