Cover of the latest National Brass Ensemble album (courtesy of Pentatone)
About two months ago Pentatone released its first album of the National Brass Ensemble (NBE), which, unless I am mistaken, was also the group’s second album, the first having been a recording that shared the labels of OBERLIN MUSIC, the official label of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and 50 Oak Music, the label of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and was distributed by Naxos of America. The title of the first album was Gabrieli, and it consisted almost entirely of selections from Giovanni Gabrieli’s 1597 Sacrae symphoniae in arrangements by Tim Higgins, Principal Trombone of the San Francisco Symphony. Unless I am mistaken, all of those Gabrieli selections were performed without a conductor.
The title of the new album is Deified, which is also the title of a composition by Jonathan Bingham receiving its world premiere recording. The world premiere performance took place on June 20, 2022. This was the date of the most recent appearance in Davies Symphony Hall by NBE, performing with conductor Eun Sun Kim, Music Director of the San Francisco Opera. It was followed by a second world premiere (both in performance and on the album), “Brass Fantasy,” composed by Arturo Sandoval. Both of these works were given an “overture” in the form of a fanfare that Richard Strauss composed for the first benefit ball to be held by the Vienna Philharmonic in 1924. Those three compositions accounted for the first of the two CDs in the Deified album.
The second CD is devoted entirely to Higgins’ latest achievement as an arranger for NBE, and there is a good chance that it is his most impressive undertaking to date. Entitled simply “The Ring,” it is best described as a synopsis of the four operas of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (the ring of the Nibelung). The score was structured in four movements, one for each of the operas. More specifically, the CD has twenty tracks, two for Das Rheingold, seven for Die Walküre, four for Siegfried, and seven for Götterdämmerung. The overall duration is slightly shy of 80 minutes.
Compared with the overall duration of the four Wagner operas, this amounts to a modest number. However, those that know Wagner’s version are probably well aware of how he drew upon the concept of the leitmotif to guide the listener through the complexities of the narrative. The Wikipedia page for “Leitmotif” cites The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music for the concept’s definition as a “short, recurring musical phrase" associated with a particular person, place, or idea. It is closely related to the musical concepts of idée fixe or motto-theme.” Higgins clearly understood Wagner’s Leitmotif vocabulary; and, if his results did not account for every last one, they certainly captured the ones that were most critical for the overall plot.
There is no doubt that this was an impressive undertaking. Having listened to it when it was performed in Davies and revisited it several times on the new Pentatone release, I can say with some confidence that it is unlikely anyone could do a better job than Higgins achieved. For that matter, having reached an age when I can no longer count the number of my encounters with Wagner’s music, my personal opinion is that Higgins provided the most convincing account of the overall narrative this side of Anna Russell. Mind you, NBE had the benefit of having been led by a serious opera conductor; but the accomplishment still is achieved primarily through Higgins’ talents in reading Wagner’s scores.
While the three selections on the first CD are all engaging, The Ring is definitely the show-stealer on this new release.
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