Review Details
MUSIC IN THE UNIVERSITY ABERDEEN UNIVERSITY CONCERT BAND REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY CONCERT
Alan Cooper
08 November 2009
St. ANDREW’S CATHEDRAL
University Music is indeed fortunate to have a musical director of the calibre of Lt Col (Ret’d) R. J. Owen in charge of its University Concert Band. Here is a man who knows absolutely everything about how to stage a prime quality performance. He understands the capabilities of all his players including soloists. He had chosen, arranged or fine tuned all the music in order to show his band off to its very best advantage. He knows his audience too and he made sure that they would be thoroughly captivated by every one of the pieces in his programme. His prowess as a conductor is unchallengeable, and lastly, his experience as a commentator for the BBC ensured that quite apart from the music, the staging and presentation of the whole concert would resonate with sheer professionalism. The result was possibly the most enjoyable and certainly the happiest concert of the season. When it ended, no one wanted to go home.
Trevor Sharpe’s Fanfare and Soliloquy provided a rousing start to the concert. St. Andrew’s Cathedral has a difficult acoustic and if this opening piece did not quite have the sharpness and precision of attack at the beginning, the band soon grasped what was happening to the sound and as the concert progressed, their focus just kept getting clearer and clearer.
Kay Ritchie the University’s prize winning flautist was just the first in a whole parade of superb soloists to take the platform. Her playing of Joseph Canteloube’s Shepherd’s Song of the Auvergne was little short of heavenly.
Saxophone player James Secombes wowed the audience with his version of David Gates classic If, arranged by M. Gray. Bowling the audience over entirely though was the surprise inclusion in the concert of a bagpipe player, Hazel Turnbull. Her two pieces: A Scottish Soldier (an international hit for Andy Stewart in 1961) followed by a spectacular performance by both soloist and band of Highland Cathedral represented two special musical threads that ran throughout the concert. The first of these was music for Remembrance Sunday. Both Hymn to the Fallen, the music by John Williams from the film Saving Private Ryan and Elgar’s Nimrod from the Enigma Variations, always played for the Remembrance Ceremony at the Cenotaph, were moving tributes to that tradition. Another John Williams classic, the Theme from Schindler’s List has wartime connotations and here the band was fronted by violinist Jenna Main. Her lovely delicate playing was beautifully offset by the rich timbres of the wind band. The final soloist to front the band was flugal horn player Iain Lowry with a beautifully clear soaring performance of Burt Bacharach’s theme tune for the film Alfie.
The second big recurrent theme in this concert was Scottish music. After A Scottish Soldier and Highland Cathedral, the second half of the concert opened with Montague Ewing’s The Swing of the Kilt, an extraordinary musical collage of lots of well known Scottish tunes. I have to confess, I lost count. Impressions of a Scottish Air was the American composer James Ployhar’s take on Annie Laurie. Amazing Grace followed by The Flowers o’ the Forest which was played as a solo from the back of the Cathedral by Hazel Turnbull once again brought together those two threads: Scottish music and Remembrance before Burns on the March, a joyous medley of Burns tunes brought the concert to an exuberant and heart warming conclusion.
But wait, there is still one piece I have not mentioned yet, and it was the band’s own finest performance of the evening. Yes, I have left one of their best pieces till last. They excelled in two movements from Holst’s Suite in F for military band. And here I must mention that what happened with this piece exemplifies the selfless generosity which Bob Owen shows to all the young people in his charge; for in this fine piece, where he must have known that the band were going to shine, he handed over the conductor’s glory to a young pupil, student Kevin Philip who proceeded to do him, the band and Gustav Holst proud.