Following up on this past Sunday’s Chamber Music Series program, last night’s program in Davies Symphony Hall was entitled Holiday Brass; and, as should be intuitively obvious, the program featured the brass musicians of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). They were joined by a few “guest artists,” also SFS players: Edward Stephan on timpani, percussionists Jacob Nissly, James Lee Wyatt III, Bryce Leafman, and Stan Muncie, and Principal Bass Scott Pingel. The conductor for this occasion was Edwin Outwater. The program featured one original composition and arrangements for different forms of brass ensembles, following up a basically “classical” repertoire with a jazz offering.
That offering was a brass-based arrangement by Principal Trombone Timothy Higgins of a “seasonal offering” from Duke Ellington’s book. In 1960 Ellington decided he would devote an entire program to the music of another composer for one of his Las Vegas gigs. That composer turned out to be Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Ellington worked with Billy Strayhorn to prepare arrangements of movements from Tchaikovsky’s score for The Nutcracker. The result amounted to a new Nutcracker Suite, complete with alternative movement titles. Higgins extended his brass arrangement of Ellington’s full-band instrumentation to include a rhythm section of bass (Pingel) and drum kit (Nissly).
Only four of Ellington’s nine movements were performed last night. The overture was followed by the “Dance of the Floreadores” (based on the “Waltz of the Flowers”), “Sugar Rum Cherry” (a new name for the Sugar Plum Fairy), and the “Peanut Brittle Brigade” march (mistyped in the program book as “Peanut Butter Brigade”). The original Ellington-Strayhorn version, of course, involved more than brass and rhythm; but Higgins had selected those particular movements for holding up to a brass-only version. This served as the final offering on the program, and it certainly involved performance at its liveliest.
Mind you, this conclusion complemented the program getting off to a lively start. As might be expected, this involved an overture performance; and the selection was Peter J. Lawrence’s arrangement of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 96, entitled “Festive Overture.” This allowed listeners to adjust to the sonorities of brass and percussion in the absence of strings and winds, but there were no shortcomings in last night’s raucous account of this overture. The same could be said for Higgins’ arrangement of Sergei Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé suite (which gave trumpeter Mark Inouye a generous opportunity for exercise, performing offstage solos from the rear of the Terrace section).
Higgins’ arrangements of three movements from Giovanni Gabrieli’s Sacrae Symphoniae were not credited in the program. These selections were taken from Sacrae Symphoniae tracks recorded by the National Brass Ensemble, consisting of “26 busy musicians from the top nine orchestras in seven stages.” All three of the movements involved antiphonal exchanges between two brass choirs, each with its own unique complement of instruments.
The only one selection on the program that was not an arrangement a three-movement suite by Anthony DiLorenzo, who composed the music for the documentary Bathtubs Over Broadway. The title of last night’s suite was The Toy Maker, and one could easily associate each of the movement titles with the toy being depicted. As might be guessed, the enthusiastic audience demanded an encore after the “nutcracker sweets.” They got Leroy Anderson’s “Sleigh Ride,” complete with the final horse-neigh delivered by trumpeter Inouye while wearing a horse’s head. Those hi-jinks were followed by a more traditional conclusion with an arrangement of “Auld Lang Syne.” We then all filed out into the “cold winter’s night” warmed by the high spirits of the evening.
No comments:
Post a Comment