Music

home > music

Gramophone - November 2006

‘Voices of Brass’

Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique—Marche au supplice; Bizet Carmen – Habanera; Toreador Song; Elgar ‘Enigma Variations’ – Nimrod; Orff Carmina Burana – selections; Puccini La Bohème – Che gelida manina; Turandot – Nessun dorma; Saint-Saëns Symphony No. 3, ‘Organ’ – Finale (All arrangements: Snedecor) Washington Symphonic Brass / Milton Stevens MSR Classics MS 1159 (70’. DDD)

Bold-as-brass arranger horns in on showpiece tunes and arias

Brass players pine to make music beyond the narrow constraints of the repertoire written expressly for their instruments. They are especially eager to dive mouthpiece-first into beloved works best known in their orchestral and operatic guises. The Washington Symphonic Brass explore those territories to glorious effect on their newest disc, “Voices of Brass”. Why voices? Among the pieces are arias and, in the case of Orff’s Carmina Burana, the most popular choral work – after Messiah. Sixteen of the 25 movements from Orff’s cantata are here in an idiomatic and quite dazzling transcription by ensemble trumpeter Phil Snedecor. The arrangements are faithful to the original, which adores brass anyway, in coloration and character, with many instrumental substitutions that surprise and delight. The most disarming is “Olim lacus colueram”, wherein the countertenor is replaced as the roasting swan by perhaps the tipsiest of brass personalities, the trombone. Delicious.

The other vocal transcriptions won’t prompt your ears to forgo the likes of Callas, Bergonzi, Pavarotti and friends, but trumpeter Snedecor does his sensual best in Carmen’s Habañera, horn-player Martin Hackleman essays “Che gelida manina” with fine ardour, and trombonist Charles Casey is more than up to the heroic demands of “Nessun dorma”. Conductor Milton Stevens, the longtime principal trombone of the National Symphony Orchestra, puts his extensive experience under maestros to superb practice both in the vocal and the orchestral works. Snedecor’s arrangement of “Nimrod” from Elgar’s Enigma Variations comes across as a noble reworking, and his versions of the march from Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique and the finale from Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony emerge from the ensemble’s bells in gleaming waves of sound. Who needs voices, or the rest of the orchestra, when a group of such finesse is breathing new life into familiar delicacies?

Donald Rosenberg