Introduction

I have been looking forward to this Brass and Percussion concert since the moment I joined the CBSO in January. As we’re usually in our comfortable spot at the back of the orchestra, stepping up to the front for this concert is a fun challenge – before we return to our usual spot next week!

Having played in brass bands throughout my formative years, this afternoon's concert is particularly meaningful to me, as we play a selection of music that resonates deeply with this rich musical heritage.
One of the best things about playing a brass instrument is the sheer variety of genres we get to explore, and this programme is a perfect example of that. From the dramatic energy of Jacob Gade’s Jealousy to the sultry passion of the Piazzolla and the thrilling virtuosity of Kimmo – where Jason Lewis will undoubtedly amaze us all – it’s a programme full of excitement and contrast.

We close with Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, a cornerstone of the trumpet player’s repertoire and a piece that every trumpeter spends years hoping to perfect. Elgar Howarth’s brass ensemble arrangement brings out the power and brilliance of the instruments, making for a thrilling performance. It feels especially poignant to be playing this piece following Howarth’s death in January this year. His contributions to the brass world, from his legendary arrangements to his presidency of the National Youth Brass Band, have left an indelible mark on generations of musicians, myself included. I was lucky enough to play under his baton on an NYBB course – an experience I will always cherish.

For me, this concert is a celebration of everything I love about brass playing – virtuosity, versatility, and above all, the joy of making music together. I hope you enjoy it as much as we do!

Kaitlin Wild
Principal Second Trumpet

Programme Notes

Gade’s Tzigane is probably the most famous tango in the world, and Bissell's arrangement 'Jealousy' certainly does it justice; while the fabulous music from Piazzolla’s tango-opera María de Buenos Aires deserves to be better-known. Eliasson’s Kimmo is a wild ride for trumpet and percussion, before CBSO brass and percussion combine for Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.

Jealousy

Jacob Gade (1879-1963)

Tango Tzigane (also known as ‘Jalousie’) is one of the best-known dance themes of the twentieth century. It was written in 1925 by the Danish composer Jacob Gade, who was inspired by reading of a ‘crime of passion’ in a newspaper. Its first performance was part of a lineup of pieces accompanying the silent film Don Q, Son of Zorro, and it became hugely popular after publication and numerous radio broadcasts. Over the following years the Tango has adorned further atmospheric movie moments, from a darkly portentous cabaret scene in Schindler’s List (1993) to a theatrical tango between Angela Lansbury and David Niven in 1978’s Death on the Nile. In 1951 it was released as a song by Frankie Laine in the 1950s, with the opening lyric ‘Jealousy/Night and day you torture me’.

The melodramatic opening sets the mood for the sultry ‘jalousie’ theme, which in turn is followed by a softer, more romantic section (in Laine’s version ‘We dance to a tango of love/Your heart beats with mine as we sway’). It has been arranged for numerous ensembles in the subsequent years, including this characterful version for brass. Next to them, the cornets … are gossiping about the horns. They whisper amongst themselves and point at the horns.’

Suite from Maria de Buenos Aires

Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992)

Marie de Buenos Aires was a ‘tango opera’ (or ‘operita’) written by the Argentinian composer Ástor Piazzolla in 1968. It is a surreally symbolic tale of the birth and death of the tango, followed by its rebirth as ‘nuevo tango’ via the fate of Maria de Buenos, an Argentinian sex worker.

It was originally scored for Piazzolla’s ensemble: bandonéon (a kind of concertina), piano, guitar, violin and double bass, supplemented by further wind, strings and percussion. Steven Verhelst made a thrilling arrangement of several numbers from the opera for the brass and percussion of the Royal Concertgebouw in the 2020s.

‘Yo soy Maria’ (I am Maria) opens the work in a beguiling and swinging style with lyrical trombone and trumpet solos, along with exhilarating whoops from the horn. The trombone gently segues into the next two numbers, taken from the ‘Balada para un organito Loco’ in the original opera (ballad for a mad organito, or barrel organ). In the first part the trumpets perform two gorgeously soulful solos; in the second (the ‘Habanera’) the horns take the stage, accompanied atmospherically by temple blocks. The trumpets then return, in even more melancholy fashion. The rhythmic and fiendishly complex ‘Fuga y Misterio’ concludes the suite, the brass instruments chasing each other around the score with a vigorous theme, punctuated by percussion thumps. The middle section has muted trumpets giving an eerie, ‘Misterio’ backdrop to a trombone solo. More solos follow, before the energetic music of the opening returns, bringing the suite to a rumbustious close.

Kimmo

Anders Eliasson (1947-2013)

As young child, before he was able to play an actual instrument, Anders Eliasson found himself marshalling musical sounds into order through the use of a toy soldier set (as he explained in an interview ‘I had a lot of “make-believe instruments.” I gathered my toy soldiers into an orchestra, sat down in front of them, and sang, imitating [their] sounds’). His instinct, even at the age of nine, was to pit sonorities against each other – and this is a significant feature of Kimmo, a work for solo trumpet and percussion composed in 1996. The trumpet became Eliasson’s instrument (he was given one shortly after the toy soldier experiment) and Kimmo was composed for gifted virtuoso player Håkan Hardenberger.

The trumpet is technically the main soloist, but it frequently takes its thematic and rhythmic lead from one of the many percussion instruments playing alongside. The marimba and xylophone have strenuous workouts, delivering complex patterns of semiquavers, while the vibraphone provides gentler, more lyrical interventions. Alongside these pitched instruments (others include crotales, or antique cymbals, and chimes) are unpitched drums, tambourines, suspended cymbals, cowbells and tom-toms. Drawn to both jazz and the intricate, interweaving lines of baroque music, Eliasson subjects small ‘cells’ of themes to repetition and transformation; in Kimmo the effect is rigorous, punchy – and utterly thrilling.

Pictures at an Exhibition

Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881)

Mussorgsky originally conceived Pictures at an Exhibition as a piano suite. He composed it in 1874 in response to an exhibition of paintings in St Petersburg by his friend Viktor Hartmann, who had died suddenly the previous year. Some of the paintings have been identified – such as ‘Ballet of the Unhatched chicks,’ which came from a costume for choreography, and ‘The Hut on Fowl’s Legs’ (the ‘Baba Yaga’ movement), a clock designed with legs like a chicken.

Mussorgsky places himself inside the work during the ‘Promenade’ sections, depicted in an initially stately theme, and then varied upon several times. He wrote that he had conjured up a musical picture of himself ’roving through the exhibition, now leisurely, now briskly, in order to come close to a picture that had attracted his attention, and at times sadly, thinking of his departed friend.’ The piece seems to have been considered a novelty – and not to be taken seriously – by both composer and his circle of friends, and it was not published in his lifetime. It subsequently appeared in print and its vivid, sometimes bizarre imagery has attracted the attention of many composers and musicians over the subsequent decades. There are an extraordinary number of existing arrangements, from Ravel’s famous orchestration, to an even more spectacular rendering by Henry Wood, to a version by Yaron Gottfried for jazz trio, to Mekong Delta’s take for thrash metal band.

A review in the Sunday Times once described Elgar Howarth’s arrangement for brass ensemble as more faithful to the original than the orchestral transcriptions. Its characterful solos and idiomatic writing for both brass and percussion certainly render it a more intimate experience. At its first appearance the ‘Promenade’ theme is given to a solo trumpet, its second is for euphonium, and the third swells richly into full ensemble. (Increasingly the theme takes on the character of the surrounding movements, with its fourth appearance foretelling the snarls between Goldenberg and Schmuyle.) After the growling ‘Gnomus,’ ‘Il Vecchio Castillo’ gives the mournful solos to the euphonium and bugle. ‘Tuileries’, with its twinkling from the glockenspiel, is light as a feather and over in a flash; ‘Bydlo’, depicting the movement of cattle, is contrastingly heavyweight. The ‘Ballet of unhatched chicks’ has the atmosphere of a cartoon-caper, with its hectic xylophone and chirruping muted trumpets.

While the numbers are often arranged in contrasting pairs ‘Samuel" Goldenberg and Schmuyle’ reprsents a contrast in itself. A portentous theme in low brass is pitched against a higher-pitched, more anxious motif, which seems to borrow its instrumentation from the unhatched chicks. After a stirring version of the ‘Promenade’, ‘Limoges’ depicts a busy day at the market, before lurching into the suitably haunting ‘Catacombs’, with its great slabs of sonority out of which emerges a hymn-like trumpet solo. A shivering xylophone introduces ‘Cum mortuis in lingua mortua’, a sepulchral ‘Promenade’ among the dead. ‘Baba Yaga’ is punchy and somewhat sinister, the low brass instrument heckled by blasts from the higher ones, softening briefly into some atmospheric marimba trills. Finally, the Great Gate of Kiev transforms ‘Promenade’ in grand style, with the tolling of bells, a noble chorale and a full-blooded, celebratory conclusion.

© Richard Bratby