031511CleWindsRev
Review
Cleveland Winds at CSU's Waetjen Auditorium (March 7)
by Daniel Hathaway
Cleveland Winds describes itself as “a professional-quality wind ensemble”. The group easily lived up to that tagline on Monday evening, March 7 in CSU’s Waetjen Auditorium, in a short but beautifully played program of two twentieth-century works that formed the third part of the evening’s concert. Cleveland Winds were preceded by two invited ensembles: the Cleveland Heights High School Wind Ensemble under Brett Baker, and a larger, multi-generational community ensemble, the North Royalton Community Band, led by Cleveland Winds percussionist Mark Wozniak. The concert was continuous with only brief intermissions for changing personnel and setups.
The Cleveland Winds segment comprised two works that had originally been premiered on the same concert by the University of Southern California Wind Orchestra in December of 1964: Ingolf Dahl’s Sinfonietta and Aaron Copland’s Emblems. Tonight, they were conducted respectively by Howard Meeker, CSU’s director of instrumental music, and Birch Browning, music director of Cleveland Winds.
Dahl’s clean, bright and charming work has an elaborate compositional plan involving analogs to bridge architecture, tone rows based on the overtones of band instruments (first played backstage by some of the trumpets) and formal details including layerings of musical forms (a fugue, a waltz and a gavotte get superimposed in the second movement) and the underlaying of a passacaglia in the last. As intellectually rigorous as it sounds in the words of the composer, the Sinfonietta is accessible and easy to enjoy on its own terms. Cleveland Winds played it brilliantly with unerring intonation and fine attention to detail. Special contributions were made by the clarinet and English horn soloists.
Copland’s Emblems was one of several works commissioned by the College Band Directors National Association, with the objective of enriching the repertory of music for band with pieces representing a composer’s best work. Incidentally, it may have been the first 20th century work to incorporate the Southern Harmony tune, Amazing Grace (described by the composer as a happy accident — he had already written harmonies to which the tune, when it came along, fit like a glove).
Dense brass textures eventually led to a jazzy middle section featuring percussion, tom toms and piano, then a varied reprise of the opening material. Copland set out to write a work “that was challenging to young players without overstraining their technical abilities” but Emblems gives even the members of a professional-level ensemble a run for their money. Cleveland Winds were up to the challenge, and turned in a splendid reading of Copland’s attractive score. A particularly lovely feature was the keyboard part — both piano and celesta were ably played by Javier Gonzalez.
Cleveland Winds, now in their second season, are moving ahead with all due caution, scheduling only two concerts a season and obviously deciding to spend their available time thoroughly preparing two substantial works rather than take on a full length concert. That decision paid off on Monday evening in assured and well-prepared playing.
In the first third of the program, Cleveland Heights Symphonic Winds played Robert W. Smith’s Through the Vulcan’s Eye, the Colonel Bogey March and Alfred Reed’s Alleluia! Laudamus Te with guest organist Anne Wilson.
Up next, the North Royalton Community Band gave us a Henry Fillmore march, four dances from Bernstein’s West Side Story, two Sondheim songs with vocalists Brian Keith Johnson and Jared Plasterer and Jay Bocook’s Pearl Harbor tribute, At Dawn They Slept.
Cleveland Winds music director and the evening’s host, Birch Browning, noted that one of the overarching aims of instrumental programs is “to give you the opportunity to play an instrument until you’re done”, i.e. from elementary school until in your dotage you decide to hang it up for good. Monday night’s program clearly demonstrated three stages in the lifetime evolution of band musicians. And if you really practice, one of these days you might get to play with a group as accomplished as Cleveland Winds.
