Wind Orchestra Works by Boddice and Allen

Wind bands get a bad rap in some quarters — memories, perhaps, of high-school football halftimes or municipal park concerts on a hot Sunday. This Royal Conservatoire of Scotland release should embarrass anyone still nursing that prejudice. These are conservatory students, yes, but they play like professionals who’ve spent thirty years inside the idiom.

Peter Graham’s On the Shoulders of Giants opens the program and announces its ambitions immediately: a direct lift from the close of Bruckner’s Eighth, transplanted into brass-band terms, all that granitic weight translated into reeds and valves. It’s a cheeky gesture, borrowing a cathedral to build a bandstand, but Graham has the craft to make it stick. The piece is a love letter to the American brass tradition. You can hear Sousa lurking in the exuberant peroration, and there’s a wonderfully wistful passage that seems to summon Miles Davis and Gil Evans without ever quoting them outright, more an atmosphere than a citation. I caught less of Tommy Dorsey than the notes promised; maybe that’s on me, maybe it’s just further back in the mix. Either way it’s a fifteen-minute-plus showpiece that never sags, and the RCS players attack it with real swagger. This is a live album and you can feel the room — a little bloom on the brass, some audience rustle, nothing intrusive.

Christian Lindberg’s Behac Munroh is the disc’s most purely entertaining item. Lindberg, one of the great trombone virtuosi of the last half-century, knows exactly what he’s asking of his soloists, and he writes with a wink throughout. His own booklet note apparently does some gentle demolition work on the piece’s own pretensions, which tells you everything about the composer’s temperament. Tango rhythms rub up against filmic sweep and klezmer-tinged inflections from Eastern Europe. There’s a passage where trombone and trumpet lines slacken and interlace and I swear I heard, for four or five bars, something close to the icy fanfare-language of Janáček’s Sinfonietta. Whether that’s Lindberg’s intention or my ear playing tricks, I can’t say — but it’s there. Dávur Magnussen and Tom Poulson, the soloists, dispatch the double-concerto writing with an easy virtuosity that never tips into showing off; the baroque-flavored perpetual motion of the finale asks for a kind of manic precision, and they supply it without visible strain. Some listeners, the more austere temperament, might find Lindberg’s magpie tendencies a little too much, too many ideas crammed into too small a box. I’m not one of them. I found it a delight from beginning to end.

Steve Forman’s Inner Weather, also captured live, works a very different vein: genuinely atmospheric, almost tone-painting in its intent. Ominous tremolandi and stabbing brass calls conjure instability before a word of program note is needed. There’s a scherzo passage where snare-drum tattoos seem to whip up something like a gale, wind (pun unavoidable) through the actual winds. Low pedal tones from the tubas ground the piece even as the upper sonorities scatter and shriek.

Martin Dalby’s A Plain Man’s Hammer is knottier, more allusive, and I confess some of its references — Mahler, Janáček again, flamenco gestures woven into a wry send-up of a tango — sailed past me on first hearing, and on the second too, if I’m honest. That’s not necessarily a fault in the piece; Dalby, who died in 2016 after a long career largely spent inside BBC Scotland’s new-music apparatus, was never a composer who wrote down to his audience, and this is music that rewards, or perhaps demands, the score in hand.

Rory Boyle’s Behemoth closes matters in suitably combative fashion: nine minutes of controlled aggression, the ensemble sounding entirely unfazed by its demands.

Nigel Boddice and Bryan Allen, dividing conducting duties, secure playing of real polish and, more importantly, real character. Anyone still condescending to the wind-orchestra repertoire, or assuming student ensembles can’t summon professional fire, should sit down with this disc and be corrected. Warmly, unhesitatingly recommended.