The President's Corner
October/November 2001
At one stage when Simon Rattle was Principal Conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Mark Elder was Principal Guest Conductor. The story is told that shortly after Simon became Sir Simon, a couple of the City of Birmingham players met in the bandroom, and one asked the other, "Who is conducting next week, is it Sir Simon?" "No," replied the other, "it is M-Mark".
I miss not only the ready wit of the professional bandroom but also the camaraderie — conducting can be a lonely business, and that is perhaps the greatest raison d'être for WASBE, that it uniquely puts conductors, composers, players, administrators and enthusiasts from all over the world into contact with each other.
There is an interview with Rattle in the latest edition of the WASBE Journal, in which he talks about his latest commission for wind ensemble, Gran Duo by Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg, and his plan to play it in his first season with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. He has also commissioned a work for wind with cellos and basses for his first season from the young German composer Heiner Goebbels.
The great percussion virtuoso Evelyn Glennie, is scheduled to record Thea Musgrave's Journey through a Japanese Landscape for marimba and wind ensemble in Singapore at the same hall in which the 2005 WASBE Conference will be held.
Frank Battisti reports that at Tanglewood this summer, the final concert by the Young Artists Wind Ensemble in Seiji Ozawa Hall on August 2, 2001 included the premiere performance of a new piece by Rafael A. Hennandez III, Inconnurvana. This piece was composed for the Young Artists Wind Ensemble as part of a new project initiated this year by the Boston Symphony Orchestra's Berkshire Music Center Composition Department and the Tanglewood Institute's YAWE program.
New member Mark Heron writes that at the BBC Proms, Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony played Aurora by Augusta Read Thomas, the second of a trilogy of commissions with Barenboim featured as soloist and conductor. Scored for solo piano accompanied by orchestral wind and brass, 2221:2210: 2 perc: with a string quintet: and soprano vocalist, this is a continuous 15 minute work composed around the notion of attack and decay, and contrasting this fundamental characteristic of the piano with the accompanying wind and strings. Controversy raged in Bandchat about whether this is a wind piece, a chamber piece, an orchestral piece or what. Suffice it to say that it is a piece of music in which wind are prominent, it was commissioned jointly by the Chicago and the Berlin Philharmonic, and in a wind programme it would provide a change of pace and colour, and would perhaps be a great foil to the Schulhoff Concerto for String Quartet and wind ensemble.
This is the peak of the wind ensemble activity round the world, and you may be asking what relevance has this to you and your college, professional, school or community band. I believe that the relevance is similar to that of the great professional symphony orchestras of the world to the school and community orchestra. To have professional players and first rank composers involved in the wonderful world of wind music means that we have role models for our conductors and players, we have ideas for our composers to emulate which are not commercially driven. Just as the conductor of the amateur or student orchestra will listen to Masur's Brahms, Harnoncourt's Mozart, Rattle's Mahler or Colin Davis's Berlioz, so the conductor of the amateur or student wind orchestra can now listen to any number of fine performances of the band classics, as well as of contemporary repertoire, a luxury for us denied to our orchestral colleagues. Have you by the way heard Rattle's Lincolnshire Posy, Tilson Thomas's Dahl Concerto, Hindemith's Hindemith Symphony in Bb, Symphonie Funèbre et Triomphale conducted by Colin Davis, Charles Dutoit or new WASBE Life-member Désiré Dondeyne?
At our 11th Conference in Jönköping, we shall have as one of our principal guests the great trombone virtuoso, Christian Lindberg, as soloist, composer and conductor, an inspiration for our players, whether students, amateurs or professionals.
Tim Reynish