Conductor: Paul Holland
Soloists: Paul Richards; Daniel Thomas
Elgar International Festival of Brass
The Bradshaw Hall
Royal Birmingham Conservatoire
Sunday 7th June
Building on their recent Newbury Festival appearance and just a few weeks away from their challenge to become World Champion in Kerkrade, Flowers again displayed their heavy lifting musical muscles for an audience to admire.
Much was reprised from that impressive (and sweaty) festival showing, the only addition, Paul Richards’ wonderfully cool-headed display of lyrical soprano playing on Paul Saggers’ ‘Poor Paris, Love was your Achilles’.
It would take some ankle shot to pinpoint any weakness in his playing at present. So too a band playing with a level of confidence borne of their European triumph in Linz, sealed there by a stunning rendition of Oliver Waespi’s ‘West Wind: Metamorphoses for Brass Band’.
It would take some ankle shot to pinpoint any weakness in his playing at present. So too a band playing with a level of confidence borne of their European triumph in Linz
Pulsating
Romantically poetic as well as pulsating with a modernistic vibe, it once again drew the listener (including the composer) into the self-absorbed mind of Emily Bronte.
Here though the music flowed darkly with just a smidgen less adrenaline coursing through the veins – a sensitivity shaped by the MD making for a final section of incessant emotive intensity.
Elegiac beauty
Following its Newbury premiere, Kelly-Marie Murphy’s ‘Heliosphere’ also sounded much brighter as a concert opener of heated substance, whilst the day’s second rendition of ‘Ar Lan y Mor’, with its tender flugel lead, was moulded in elegiac beauty.
However, it remains curiously unengaging, despite Daniel Thomas dancing freely above it all like a brilliantly strobe-lit wasp of endless technical wizardry.
The repetitive circuitry that underpins the accompaniment to Lucy Pankhurt’s ‘Electric’ euphonium concertino gives the 1980s synth-pop inspiration an authentic binary ‘on-off’ pulse.
However, it remains curiously unengaging, despite Daniel Thomas dancing freely above it all like a brilliantly strobe-lit wasp of endless technical wizardry.
Bicep bursting
Jonathan Bates ‘Pall Mall’ provided a sugary boost of fun before a final display of serious flexing occasionally threatened to get a little too bulging and bicep bursting in a robust ‘Music of the Spheres’ to close.
That though will surely be refined and detailed to a potential title-winning peak well ahead of the British Open by a band that at present is riding on a crest of collective confidence that shows little sign of being stopped in its competitive tracks.
Iwan Fox
