Top brass

This is one of my favourite Wednesday lunchtime concerts each year.   A bunch of professional players with the sweet tones of brass playing a mix of styles, entertaining and competent and interesting.   And pretty loud, too, but that's the nature of brass.  Loud at top and bottom: first up a medley of John Williams film marches because an Army band should shart with a march after all. Raiders and Star Wars and Superman and more, delicious and inviting and rollicking.  Then a chorale for Covid and a Bach prelude and a Bruckner piece written for his mother.  This is already a massive range of styles but the Bruckner must have been the most out of this ordinary, quiet and calm and pensive, nonetheless well received.  Then Bach again, this time in two harmonisations.  The common one was the best received and I thought it worked best anyway, the other being more dissonant and really not Bach to my ears.  Then a polka and Selections from West Side Story.  I love anyone who plays West Side Story.  Something coming... Then What a wonderful world  with a soloist out front on flugelhorn, somewhat a noisy big band tune to end on and not actually my favourite, although the flugelhorn was beautifully played.  Brass played with the classical tone is a huge bliss.  The concert was programmed and conducted and introduced and occasionally played by Sgt Nick Salter.  Much enjoyed.

The RMC Brass Group performed at Wesley under Sgt Nick Salter (director).

The seduction of brass

Perhaps seduction is not a think to consider as you watch an army band in uniform, khaki, stripes and the rest, but close your eyes and listen and the professional chops and bell-like clarity of the brass is obvious.  And you wouldn't start a seduction with Wagner, either, especially a funeral march, but it was a work of delicious wonder, to lead into a varied program from training dragons through to jazzy doo-dah from Stephen Foster and that infectious tune Brazil and some inescapable (and ever welcome) Bach and a combination from the authentic religious brass of the Salvos.  I used to see them occasionally in the suburban streets, marching their beliefs in 4/4.  There was variation of combinations, too, in this concert.  Three big works with mostly all the performers and four smaller works, each for a quartet of an instrument: trumpets on Bach; horns or Dragons; trombones on that jazzy Doo-dah suite; euphos and tubas on Brazil.  It all worked a treat.  Fun or lively, serious or serene or funereal, these were immensely beauteous tones, soft and rich and loud, well intoned and tongued.  Just a huge pleasure.  I must get to the RMC band again in future.  They play pretty regularly and cheaply for the public, at Canberra Theatre or Llewellyn, symphonic or concert or brass band, proceeds to charity, and those uniforms and always that satisfying professionalism.

The Royal Military College Band Brass Group played at Wesley Church under Major Darren Cole (CO, MD) and Cpl Justin Lingard (Conductor).