LIVE at the Centre

Live at the Centre is a brand-new series of concerts featuring mid-sized ensemble repertoire that is rarely played live, brought to you by our very own CBSO musicians and performed at the Justham Auditorium in our home at CBSO Centre. In the midst of our centenary celebrations and programmed by the musicians themselves, the theme of these first concerts - A Toast to the Twenties - celebrates music from the era of when the orchestra began.

The roaring Twenties: a decade when everything changed. Dresses went up, hair came down, and new words entered the language: foxtrots, flappers, bobs and the blues. And composers threw themselves into the spirit of the times, with some of the most colourful, original – and unexpected – music of the 20th century.

A hundred years on, the musical world has been transformed all over again, and the CBSO is adapting with it. As our musicians perform live in public after an unprecedented silence, and as we welcome you, our audience, into our home for the first time since…well, you know what…we celebrate the rarely-heard music of that exuberant era, in a specially devised series of concerts at CBSO Centre. Let the music play!

Friday 23 October 2020, 1pm & 5.30pm

A Toast to the Twenties: English Brass

Bliss Fanfare No. 5 “A Wedding Fanfare” 1′ Holst A Moorside Suite 15′ Arnold Symphony for Brass 24′ Ireland A Downland Suite 18′

Conductor Michael Seal

Please note, there will be no interval

Admit it: we could all do with a bit of a boost this year. So we’re in luck – because the CBSO’s superb brass section are specialists at lifting the spirits and raising the roof. And with music by three great British composers who actually conducted the CBSO, there’s no shortage of great tunes and sonic fireworks today - whether the country dances of Holst’s Moorside Suite or Malcolm Arnold’s powerful Symphony for Brass: one of the true neglected masterpieces of British music. John Ireland’s atmospheric Sussex landscape ends the concert with a blast of fresh country air: music with deep roots and a big heart. Exactly what we need right now.

Arthur Bliss (1891-1975) Fanfare No. 5 “A Wedding Fanfare” (1960)

Horn Trombone Elspeth Dutch Richard Watkin Anthony Howe Julian Turner

Trumpet Bass Trombone Jonathan Holland David Vines Alan Thomas Richard Blake Tuba Jonathan Quirk Graham Sibley Stephen Murphy

When Sir Arthur Bliss supervised recordings of his own music with the CBSO in 1966, percussionist Maggie Cotton noted that “he always seemed to me to be a quaint cross between Peter Rabbit and Queen Victoria”. But half a century earlier he’d fought on the Western Front, and sinister fanfares haunt his great choral symphony Morning Heroes (1930), a precursor of Britten’s War Requiem.

Bliss took pageantry seriously, writing nearly 40 fanfares for occasions ranging from the appointment of the new High Sheriff of Dorset in 1963 to a Research Fanfare in October 1973 (for the 21st anniversary service of the National Fund for Crippling Diseases – a commission that might have defeated a lesser composer). This sonorous Wedding Fanfare was one of a series composed for the wedding of Princess Margaret to Antony Armstrong-Jones (the future Lord Snowdon) in Westminster Abbey on 6 May 1960.

Gustav Holst (1874-1934) A Moorside Suite (1928) Scherzo Nocturne March

Horn Trombone Elspeth Dutch Richard Watkin Anthony Howe Trumpet Julian Turner Jonathan Holland Alan Thomas Bass Trombone Richard Blake David Vines Jonathan Quirk Stephen Murphy Tuba Graham Sibley

For the City of Birmingham Orchestra’s first music director Appleby Matthews, contemporary classical music was a vital cause, and he made a point of inviting living composers to conduct the CBO. Elgar, Sibelius, Arthur Bliss, Rutland Boughton, Granville Bantock, Eric Fogg and Hamilton Harty all worked with the orchestra in its first seasons.

But no composer appeared more often with the CBO than the Cheltenham-born Gustav Holst, who conducted the orchestra on at least four occasions between October 1920 (the first performance of The Planets outside of London) and the European premiere of his Egdon Heath in March 1928. He described his March 1927 performance of The Planets with the CBO as “the most overwhelming event of my life”; an autographed photograph of the composer, with a personal message of thanks, remains one of the CBSO’s most treasured possessions.

Holst had a deep respect for the artistry of orchestral players; a trombonist in his youth, he understood brass band writing from the inside. “His affection for the trombone was lasting, and he knew the texture of the band instinctively and could get the best out of every instrument” remembered his daughter Imogen. “Propaganda in any form was distasteful to him, but the one thing that would rouse him to indulge in it himself was the need of better music for brass bands”. So he was delighted to receive a commission to write a test piece for the 1928 National Band Festival at Crystal Palace (the same festival that would later commission Ireland’s Downland Suite).

The Moorside Suite frames a twilit, profoundly poetic Nocturne with a virtuosic Scherzo (more than a hint of a folkdance here) and a bravura March: a powerfully original musical imagination reinventing a tradition from within. At the Festival (on 29 September 1928) Imogen writes, Holst “listened to it fifteen times on end. Here were players who combined the enthusiasm of amateurs with the skill of professionals. It was not only their technical proficiency that he admired so much: it was their sense of phrasing and their real musicianship”. The Black Dyke Mills Band – not for the last time – won the day.

Sir Malcolm Arnold (1921 - 2006) Symphony for Brass, Op.123 (1978) Allegro moderato Allegretto grazioso Andante con moto Allegro con brio

Horn Trombone Elspeth Dutch Richard Watkin Anthony Howe Trumpet Julian Turner Jonathan Holland Alan Thomas Bass Trombone Richard Blake David Vines Jonathan Quirk Stephen Murphy Tuba Graham Sibley

When, in 1969, Malcolm Arnold was elected a Bard of the Cornish Gorsedd, he was given the name Trompour – “Trumpeter”. And that’s what he remained, long after he stopped playing professionally. As a boy, 78rpm records of Louis Armstrong inspired him to choose music as a career, and by the mid-1940s he was principal trumpet of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. As a composer, nothing defined his sound so much as his brass writing - as brilliant and idiomatic as Elgar’s writing for strings. His Fantasy for solo Horn (now a classic) was written in 1966 to a commission from the CBSO: the manuscript score is now kept on the second floor of CBSO Centre.

The Symphony for Brass dates from a dark time in Arnold’s life: early in 1978, after returning to the UK after several years living in Ireland. That adventure had ended with a nervous breakdown; now, living in Belsize Park, he was grappling with worsening depression as he struggled to salvage his relationship with his estranged family. Musical friends felt that commissions might offer him an emotional as well as professional lifeline, and Philip Jones, whose brass ensemble had frequently performed Arnold’s Brass Quintet (1961), encouraged him to persevere with a new work – playing him a recording of Elgar Howarth’s arrangement of Pictures at an Exhibition by way of inspiration. Arnold completed his Symphony for Brass on 9 March 1978 – along with his Eighth Symphony, completed later that year, the last work that he would complete before the catastrophic mental collapse that all but ended his composing career. It was premiered at the Cheltenham Festival on 8 July 1979.

But if the mood of the Symphony is (unsurprisingly) troubled, it’s still the work of a master-craftsman in full possession of his creative powers. Scored for ten instruments, and in four deftly-shaped movements, the title “Symphony” is a clue to its scope and seriousness. Suspecting that it would not be widely played, and fully aware of the brilliance of Jones and his colleagues, Arnold deliberately made it “fiendishly difficult”, exploiting every colour and timbral possibility of the instruments in the brooding first movement: a haunted, overcast struggle between gloom and dazzling, sometimes fierce, flashes of light.

The Allegretto second movement is an eerie, spare intermezzo in the spirit of Shostakovich (desolate pairings of one or two instruments would become a hallmark of Arnold’s late style). It plays out in icy, muted timbres, from which the Andante rises, forbiddingly, like a cliff face. Arnold’s melodies wander, unmoored, on the edge of tonality, before a finale whose bursts of sonic brilliance and melancholy lyricism can’t obscure the muscular, jagged fugal energy with which Arnold strives to find order amid the music’s ominous tensions. The final resolution is hard won – and all the more powerful for it.

John Ireland (1879-1962) A Downland Suite (1932) (arranged for symphonic brass) Prelude Elegy Minuet Rondo

Horn Trombone Elspeth Dutch Richard Watkin Mark Phillips Anthony Howe Jeremy Bushell Julian Turner Martin Wright Bass Trombone Trumpet David Vines Jonathan Holland Alan Thomas Tuba Richard Blake Graham Sibley Jonathan Quirk Stephen Murphy Percussion Andrew Herbert Toby Kearney Matthew Hardy

John Ireland was born near Altrincham, and studied at the Royal College of Music. He drew much of his mature inspiration from the countryside of southern England, and would retreat when he could to the Channel Islands and the Sussex Downs. The titles of Ireland’s works tell the story: Amberley Wild Brooks, Sarnia, A Downland Suite. He sketched his Piano Concerto in the countryside around the Iron Age hill fort of Chanctonbury Ring, in the South Downs.

So – as a northerner in love with the landscape of the South – Ireland relished the paradox of writing for brass band. “Thirty-four years ago, few people in the south of England had ever heard a brass band” he wrote in the Daily Mirror in September 1934. He’d been asked to write a test-piece for the 190 bands competing in the National Band Festival at the Crystal Palace: some 4500 brass players in total. It wasn’t the first time, either; he’d written a test-piece for the October 1932 festival, after finding himself seated next to the organizer of the festival, John Iles, at a dinner for the Worshipful Company of Musicians.

That had been his first encounter with the technical challenges of writing for brass band – and “the inescapable fact that the cornet, baritone and euphonium are all instruments of more or less the same type”. “I have often thought that it might be decided improvement if trumpets are added, but whether this is practical at the present time is debatable” he added ruefully. So for this limited but characterful palate, he created a set of four musical landscape- drawings of his beloved South Downs – as if welcoming this northern musical tradition to a world he’d come to love.

The four movements of Ireland’s Downland Suite distil the contours and atmosphere of folk music (though Ireland never uses an actual folk tune) into concise classical forms, perfectly gauged to show the full technical and expressive range of the competing bands. There’s a bracing Prelude (marked energico), a hymn-like Elegy, a graceful Minuet and a Rondo that glances back at the Elegy before bustling to a suitably brilliant finish. Ireland later rewrote the central two movements for strings, but this version for orchestral brass finds a satisfying middle-ground between full orchestra and the richer range of colour that Ireland clearly craved. He gets his trumpets at last!