Uneven Recording from Chicago Gargoyle Brass

from the Amazon.com Web page for the album being discussed

As of this morning, I have managed to catch up on my backlog of physical recordings. (The downloads are another matter. They are still pretty imposing, but I tend to be able to work through them at a steadier pace.) This morning provided me the opportunity to listen to Nights Bright Days, the second MSR Classics release of the Chicago Gargoyle Brass and Organ Ensemble. This group was founded as a brass chamber ensemble in 1992 by its Artistic Director, H. Rodney Holmes, whose members were faculty and students at the University of Chicago. (The name came from the number of gargoyles one could encounter in the campus architecture.) By 2006 the ensemble had professionalized and established a residency in the western suburbs at a major church with a full-time professional organist. Its first MSR Classics album was released in August of 2015. Nights Bright Days was released this past April, followed by an album of music of the Reformation, which was released in November.

The album title is taken from the last line of William Shakespeare’s 43rd sonnet, whose final couplet is:

All days are nights to see till I see thee,

And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.

That sonnet was one of four to be set to music by Peter Meechan in a composition entitled Love Songs. He wrote the piece to serve as a memorial for Holmes’ wife Charlene. The work was scored for brass quintet, organ, narrator, and choir. The two trumpeters double on flugelhorn, performing with horn, trombone, and tuba. The organist is Mark Sudeith, the narrator is Kevin Gudahl, and the choir combines the resources of the Oriana Singers and the City Voices of Chicago, both led by William Chin.

Setting the sonnets of Shakespeare is no easy matter. As can be seen from that above couplet, just figuring out how to read the text aloud without twisting the tongue is a challenge unto itself. One can appreciate Meechan’s decision to allocate some of that text to a narrator, rather than to any vocalists. One can also appreciate his acknowledgement that his approach to interpreting the texts was “of course in no way definitive.” However, even in giving the composer the benefit of the doubt, there were too many instances on the recording of inadequately polished sonorities matched by uncertain intonation and dynamics (shared by both instrumentalists and the choir). There are also noticeable problems of balance, and it is hard to tell whether they are due to the space in which the recordings were made or the skills of the recording team.

All the other selections on the album are arrangements by Craig Garner. None of them are particularly convincing, but it is difficult to discern whether the problems arise with the arranger or the performers. The composers whose music is being arranged make for an impressive list: Henry Purcell (excerpts from the ode Come Ye Songs of Art), Gustav Holst (a Cornish folk song that found its way into his second suite for military band), and Benjamin Britten (the instrumental episodes from his Peter Grimes opera). The weakest of the selections comes from Britten, whose meticulous sense of sonorous detail just does not hold up between the shortcomings of the arrangement and those of the performance.