2003 WASBE Conference

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Conference Article Archive

Monday, 30 June — The WASBE Conference Experience

My first experience of WASBE was 1991 Manchester conference. As an 18 year old 1st year student at the Royal Northern College of Music I was (probably much to the dismay of Chair of Artistic Planning Reynish) only interested in playing the tuba and drinking beer. Well, one or two other things but this is neither the time or the place….

So apart from the concerts I played you will gather that I didn’t exactly take full advantage of the events on offer at that conference. 12 years down the line I’m looking forward to a much more active participation in the myriad of concerts, clinics, and lectures on offer, whilst no doubt also managing to sample the social side of the conference.

Having retired from playing the tuba (8 years is about the right length for that particular career I think) my focus is now conducting. Although I conduct orchestras more than wind groups, it was with wind bands that I played with as a teenager and also where I cut my teeth as a conductor and I guess I still have the ‘bug’.

Looking through the conference programme what jumps out at me most of all is the diversity of the repertoire which we will perform, hear and discuss this week. Helping to break down the geographical borders which are inevitable in a medium which has hitherto existed largely to serve military, community and educational purposes is one of WASBE’s key responsibilities. The opportunity to learn more about the Nordic, Hungarian, French & Japanese repertoire on show this week is a good enough reason in itself to be here.

I suppose it is this curiosity that differentiates the WASBE delegate from those who are content with Midwest/ CBDNA/ BABSWE/ Mid-Europe or other similar events in their own locale. In her opening speech Sunday afternoon Swedish Minister of Culture Marita Ulvskog spoke about the importance of curiosity for the continued well-being of the Arts, and defined the interface between performer and audience as the point at which culture comes into being.

If WASBE is to succeed in it’s stated goal of promoting wind music as ‘a serious and distinctive medium of musical heritage and cultural expression’ the curiosity which makes people go that extra 10,000 km to get to a conference such as this is something the organisation must nourish and develop.

Stockholm Wind Symphony

The opening concert was given by the Stockholm Wind Symphony. The SWS operates in many ways like a professional symphony orchestra, and in fact they probably would describe themselves as just that. Clearly they are beneficiaries of the cultural policy which Minister Ulvskog outlined to us — oh for something worthy of that name in the UK — but they are proof of the part which wind orchestras ought to be able to play in ‘mainstream’ cultural life. In addition to that, they play pretty well too!

They were conducted today by Christian Lindberg, who along with ABBA and IKEA is one of Sweden’s best-known exports. A few years ago IKEA ran an advertising campaign in the UK called ‘Chuck out your Chintz’. Perhaps this could describe the Lindberg philosophy to concert-giving: out go the 19th century tails in favour of leather trousers and a trendy shirt. The sedate and measured procession to and from the podium is replaced by a brisk jog. The conducting gestures are often unconventional, but succeeded in drawing energetic and committed playing from the orchestra.

Compliments are also due to bass clarinettist Lena Haag for her informative and witty introductions.

Musically, the programme was well constructed, opening and closing music by Hugo Alfvén, one of Sweden’s leading composers of the first half of the 20th century. His Festival Overture was presented in a version for full wind orchestra although I wondered if it might have been more effective in an edition closer to its original scoring, which did not contain saxophones or double reeds.

Next was part of Mats Larrson Gothe’s Prelude, Dance and Conclusion, which I for one would have liked to hear in its entirety. As with so much of our repertoire there was a Stravinskian feel and the influence of his studies with Lutoslawski was also evident.

Lena suggested that whilst most of the audience would be familiar with Lindberg the trombonist, for many this would be their first encounter with Lindberg the conductor and Lindberg the composer. The first performance of his Concerto for Winds and Percussion was enthusiastically received and the high-octane virtuosic nature of the score was handled well by the SWS with some particularly fine brass playing. It will be interesting to see how this latest emerging aspect of Lindberg’s career develops over the next decade.

After the interval we heard a very fine reading of Intégrales by Varèse. Almost 80 years on the work still sounds incredibly fresh and in many ways more current that anything else on the programme. I have had that feeling before in a wind band concert, in that case comparing one of Grainger’s more adventurous works against much younger compositions. I wonder if is endemic of the wind band world, or if it is simply an inevitable consequence of a young medium whose ‘classic’ core repertoire is still evolving?

The final work in the concert was a suite drawn from Alfvén’s ballet score for John Bauer’s The Mountain King. In many ways a Swedish version of Grieg’s Peer Gynt, I thought this was a very successful transcription with some nice variety in its seven short movements which were given an extremely polished performance.

An excellent start to the conference then, although it would have been nice to hear some slow, quiet music which gave more scope for the quality of phrasing and musicality I am sure the Stockholm players are capable of. I wonder how often I’ll experience that desire this week….

Mark Heron