Brighouse and Rastrick Band

2007 RNCM Festival of Brass
Conductor: Alan Morrison
Sunday 28th January

This was the first high profile outing for Brighouse since Stephen Wilkinson was appointed to the principal cornet chair vacated by Alan Morrison following his decision to take up the position of Musical Director. As a result it was something of a new look band that took to the stage at  the Haden Freeman Concert Hall, a band that will clearly be looking to consolidate its recent Brass in Concert victory on the 2007 contest circuit.

Things certainly got off to a lively start with Kenneth Hesketh's 'Festive Overture'. Paul Hindmarsh has been a considerable champion of Hesketh's brass band music for some time now the majority of which, including Masque and 'The Alchymist's Journal' has been reworked from a seemingly endless catalogue of pieces written in his youth when he was a member of the Merseyside Youth Orchestra.

In reality there are two very different sides to Hesketh's musical persona. His work outside the brass band world is at the cutting edge of the contemporary, a tough yet colourful language that encompasses a range of genres and is diverse enough to include arrangements of music by Aphex Twin for the London Sinfonietta.

With the continued backing of Paul Hindmarsh it would be good to think that we might one day hear this other side of Hesketh's personality in a work for band. In the meantime 'Festive Overture' is a fleeting, exhuberant opener with a more reflective central section, the outer material occasionally seeming to hint at Walton as its point of departure. Alan Morrison directed a performance that zipped along at a crackling pace and had the players on their toes from the start.

At the age of only twenty RNCM student Ben Thomson is a tuba player with a very bright future ahead of him. The recipient of the BBC Radio 2 Young Brass Soloist of the Year for 2006, he has already appeared as soloist with Black Dyke and Foden's Richardson amongst others.

The Joseph Horovitz 'Tuba Concerto' is less well known than his familiar 'Euphonium Concerto' and is more adventurous in its language, particularly in the outer movements. Thomson's technique was never in question, culminating in a final movement cadenza in which he demonstrated playing of exceptional facility and clarity including a coolly nonchalant page turn! It was the long central Andante that impressed the most though. This is music of at times aching beauty and Thomson's eloquent lyricism, sensitively accompanied by the band, shone through with sincerity and warmth.

The concert overture 'The Undaunted' possibly sees Eric Ball at his most sombre. The often dark mood of the music seems at times to be a long way from 'Journey into Freedom' and 'High Peak' heard earlier in the day. Yet the Brighouse sound, more traditional perhaps than the preceding bands on Sunday, seemed to suit the music particularly well. The expressive and gently questioning central interlude was notably effective and there were solid contributions in the outer sections from all of the sections of the band.

Elgar's 'Triumphal March' from 'Caractacus' got the second half of the concert off to a stirring start albeit not without occasional rhythmic instability in the faster passages. A grand march in every respect it certainly is but it was the rolling music depicting Elgar's beloved Malvern Hills that the band shaped especially well.

There could hardly be a greater contrast than David Ellis's 'Rondo in Blue Minor' that followed. Ellis has been based in Manchester for many years, where he was the BBC producer responsible for employing Paul Hindmarsh. His catalogue of compositions is substantial although the four works he has written for brass band to date are not as well known as they deserve to be. 'Rondo in Blue Minor' is the most recent of these, written in 2001 and paying homage to the composer's love of big bands and jazz.

It's a beefy work that at once evokes the world of big bands whilst employing a sophisticated melodic and harmonic style that hints at Ellis's more overtly serious essays in symphonic form. The band gave an equally beefy performance, with the opportunity for a number of individual players to shine, not least of which was Stephen Wilkinson who made a crucial contribution to the bluesy sounds of the slower sections.

As in Leyland's concert earlier in the day, the brief piece drawn from the Brass Band Aid CD, in this case 'Ivory Ghosts' by the young composer Gavin Higgins, made quite an impression on the audience and rightly so. Lasting just a few minutes Higgins' music is a reaction to the slaughter of animals that have fallen pray to the demands of the tourist trade for ivory. For all its brevity this is music that can cast a powerful spell and the atmospheric sounds Higgins creates were exploited by the band to haunting and moving effect.

It fell to the composer who wrote the first ever original work for the National Championships to round things off in Percy Fletcher. 'An Epic Symphony' needed no introduction to those present in the hall but the exposed passages of the moving central "Elegy" are just as testing as they were back in 1926. As if to prove the point there were a few tentative entries around the stands although there was nothing tentative about the bravado of the concluding 'Heroic March' which was stirringly played in the year of its eightieth birthday. It was another march in the shape of 'The New Colonial March' that the band chose as an encore with soprano player Nigel Fielding going out in style on the brilliant piccolo part.               

And so ended another RNCM Festival of Brass. Paul Hindmarsh was generous in his thanks to those who had helped in the organisation of the festival although it fell to Alan Morrison to express the thanks of the bands and audience for Paul Hindmarsh's irreplaceable personal contribution. This year will see more broadcast hours devoted to the festival by BBC Radio 3 than any year previously and it is solely down to Paul Hindmarsh that this is the case. His modest response to the audience's applause was simply "I do it because I love it". For that we should be grateful. 

Christopher Thomas

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