Bells for Stokowski

Tielman Susato, Selections From The Danserye (arranged by Patrick Dunnigan)
Ralph Vaughan Williams, English Folksong Suite
David Del Tredici, In Wartime
Michael Daugherty, Bells For Stokowski

Jerry Junkin Conducting
The University Of Texas Wind Ensemble

Review By John Shinners
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  The symphonic wind band has the reputation of being a sort of symphony orchestra with training wheels: it plays good music, but it's not quite the real McCoy.  Still, especially in America, it's the one place where many of us with musical inclinations first encounter the joys of playing music in an ensemble.  There's fine ensemble playing to be had in the University of Texas Wind Band Ensemble's latest disc, Bells for Stokowski, though the program doesn't always live up to the players' talents.

The chestnut here is the Vaughan Williams English Folksong Suite, written for a band of the Royal Military School of Music in 1923.  It is to the symphonic band what "The Blue Danube" is to the symphony orchestra: sooner or later you have to play it.  It's the law.  As its title telegraphs, it's Vaughan Williams in his folkiest Percy Grainger mode.  It's a perfectly pleasant piece but it makes no demands on its listeners: just sit back and tap your foot.  While the band offers a thoroughly serviceable account on this disc, they play it without much enthusiasm and tend to sound overblown in the forte passages.  Junkin takes an extremely slow tempo for the middle section of the Intermezzo ("My Bonnie Boy") which makes an already choppy movement sound even more disjointed.

Patrick Dunnigan's arrangement of Tielman Susato's mid-sixteenth-century collection of dances called Danserye is much more successful.  Since the Danserye was compiled for the wind-heavy ensembles of 16th-century music, it was an inspired choice to adapt it for a modern wind band, and this arrangement showcases the talents of all the sections of this Texas group.  In some sections of the nine-part selection, such as the "Fagot" for low winds and the following "Hoeboecken dans" with a drone accompaniment, Dunnigan's orchestrations sound quite consistent with Susato's score.  In others, "Les quatre Branles," for example, accompanied by a persistent tambourine, the percussion gets a little too heavy.  Still, by and large he captures the spirit of these infectious dances and the Texas band plays it with wonderful balance and style.

David Del Tredici's In Wartime is the disappointment on the disc.  I usually like his music, but this piece was his first foray into writing for wind band, and he doesn't seem quite yet to have the ear for orchestrating for band.  He composed the piece in the months leading up to the current war in Iraq.  The immediacy of the event may have clouded his aesthetic sense, for in the second movement of the work, a meandering battle march, we get a very literal-minded musical rendition of war that gets heavy-handed enough to employ a wind-machine (Is there any work of music that has ever benefited from this awful contraption?), a ratchet, and at the end a wailing siren.  The first movement is better: a chorale melody ornamented with lovely high woodwind filigrees. The band does what it can with the piece, but it's an uphill march as the second movement plods along.

For me, the highlight here is Michael Daugherty's 2002 composition Bells for Stokowski.  Born in 1954, Daugherty is probably best known for his raucous Metropolis Symphony, inspired by the comic book adventures of Superman (and recorded by David Zinman and the Baltimore Symphony on Argo).  Here he offers homage to Leopold Stokowski in one part of a trilogy commissioned by Wolfgang Sawallisch and the Philadelphia Orchestra to celebrate that institution's hundredth anniversary.  The University of Texas winds were part of a consortium that commissioned this wind band version, presumably orchestrated by Daugherty.

The piece is a wonderfully colorful pastiche composed of washes of sound punctuated by melodies that just border on sounding familiar: is that a snatch of Petrushka?  Some Janácek maybe?  We seem to be hearing fragments of some of the pieces in Stokowski's repertoire, including fleeting reference to his Bach transcriptions. The mood of the piece keeps shifting in unexpected and delightful ways: I love the moment when a great cloud of sound dissolves and Bach's C Major Prelude from the Well-tempered Clavier peeps through and is tossed playfully around the band.  Daugherty has a marvelous ear for the tonal colors that a wind band can produce; his orchestral textures here are rich and inventive.  It sounds like these collegiate players are enjoying themselves throughout this multifaceted piece.

In fairness, I must report that I initially listened to this piece with two of my Enjoy the Music colleagues. One liked it, though probably not as much as I did; the other intoned "I hate this" throughout the performance, De gustibus etc.

The sound, as we expect from Reference, is spectacular, embracing a wide dynamic range without breaking up at either end of the spectrum and portraying an excellent sense of the dimensions of the ensemble.

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