(Barbican)
Christmas with Connaught Brass
Published – 08.12.2024
For its Barbican debut, multiprize-winning Connaught Brass despatches season’s greetings in a cracker of a programme that gift wraps festive joy with interludes of serene reflection.
Wandering through the Düsseldorf Christmas markets recently, the icy wind and sleety rain deterring neither tourists nor locals, the sound of a lone trumpeter caught my attention. Suddenly, with the opening strains of I’ll be Home for Christmas blooming among happy shoppers and children on scooters, the holiday season felt as if it were being officially ushered in. It wasn’t the song itself that marked the beginning of the season, though, it was the instrument. A trumpet, much more than a violin or a clarinet, felt most appropriate, and it’s no wonder why: brass music has been associated with Christmas for time immemorial – the carol stretching back to pagan times and the brass band coming into its own in the 19th century. Since then, the two have become inextricably linked in a way that now means whatever the music, there is something uniquely cheering about the opening bars performed by a brass ensemble.
The carol, a beloved musical tradition, is described in the opening to the Oxford Book of Carols by Percy Dearmer as giving ‘voice to the common emotions of healthy people in language that can be understood, and music that can be shared by all.’ That final piece of the puzzle – the notion of the shared carol – forms the spine of today’s programme, encompassing music from a broad variety of traditions, so that there might be something in it for everyone, whether Christmas is celebrated as a religious holiday, a cultural holiday or not celebrated at all. The spirit of carolling has become – whether or not Dearmer meant it this way – truly non-partisan, something for all humans to do together.
Beginning with the Irish/British contemporary classical composer Robin Haigh’s Get Good, Connaught Brass explore virtuosic and lyrical contours, strains of which will return in various guises throughout the programme. It forms a good opener to the programme, too, with music that delights in being fun and irreverent. From here we move to Vivaldi’s glistening Concerto in F major, which in this arrangement clothes the intricacies of the composer’s writing in perhaps surprising musical colours.
The musical colours continue to bend and waver, as pianist Zeynep Özsuca joins the fray for Lili Boulanger’s Two Pieces, arranged here for trumpet and piano. Originally for violin, Boulanger plays with musical shades – enough so that if you closed your eyes, you might hear a touch of Debussy. There is an Impressionistic tint here, but these pieces are also challenging. The first one slowly grows in texture, becoming more and more difficult and virtuosic as it goes. The second is a little more playful: joyful runs, jazzy rhythms and fiercely contrasting dynamics. It is a workout for its players, and a pleasure for its listeners. Terry Johns’s Paolozzi’s Windows keeps us piano focused, with the composer’s inspiring sketch of the stained-glass triptych in St Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh, created by the acclaimed Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi. This was his only work in stained glass, and he created the windows in the style he became known for – pop art; Johns describes the windows as ‘a glittering example of his genius’. You can almost feel the glittering come to life in this fine work, seeing those windows in your mind’s eye.
Then! The Christmas carol that perhaps we’ve waited for, has arrived – and what a carol it is: Billy Moore’s When Santa Got Stuck Up The Chimney. First recorded by Ella Fitzgerald in 1950, the song (though without lyrics today) is a funny tale of misadventure. ‘Santa, please, come back to my chimney/You can come back here (Please do come back)/‘Cause daddy made a brand new chimney/Just for you this year,’ you might sing along in your head. Festive cheer continues with a brass arrangement of the traditional Come Landlord Fill the Flowing Bowl, for which, like knowing about Santa Claus’s fateful night in the previous tune, it pays to know some of the lyrics: ‘Come landlord fill the flowing bowl until it doth run over/For tonight we’ll merry merry be/Tomorrow we’ll be sober.’
Not strictly Christmas-y, as we’ve come to expect at this point, we are treated to a special nod to Holst (whose 150th anniversary we’ve been marking this year) in an arrangement of ‘Venus’ from The Planets. This planet is, of course, the Bringer of Peace, Holst referring to it as ‘the most fortunate star under which to be born’. Two works from Mark-Anthony Turnage’s True Life Stories for solo piano follow, movingly simple in the composer’s idiomatic lyrical style. Similarly festive unspecific, Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé Suite, sparks into life – the composer’s first film music commission. It was a departure for him, Prokofiev seizing the opportunity to create something in a more accessible style.
We reach the end of our Christmas with Connaught Brass with two pieces that ready us for the beginnings of winter: the traditional carols Little Girl Blue and O come Emmanuel, followed by Bach’s ebullient closing chorus from the Christmas Oratorio beautifully arranged for brass ensemble. We leave on a high, carried by those precious, and well-known closing notes: Bach somehow still the perfect balm at this – and all – points of our year. We remember, of course, that this season can mean so much, or nothing at all: it can carry the weight of tradition and religion, or simply be a time to reconnect with friends and family. It can be a time to reflect and take stock, planning for the new year. Whatever the festive season means to you, though, good music of all persuasions helps us set the mood, and here, we have some of the best.
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