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Reynish’s dramatic personality was in exposed in full force tonight, with his robust conducting gestures and gruff comments, ranging from his opinion of ‘cheese’ in band music to certain disquieting comments on the
The second half presented a variety of attractive pieces for the mass audience, including the saccharine U Trau by Christopher Marshall, who ingenuously invented a whole new language for the text. Luis Serrano Alarcón’s Concertango gave the band a chance to show off its timbral unity, while Adam Gorb’s Dances from Crete is perhaps suitably entertaining, but somewhat tiresomely intertextual.
Overall, the concert was perhaps not entirely satisfying. The tonal or neotonal (tonal, but not quite) pieces presented have neither the urgency of the Romantics, the intimidation of eternity in the post-minimalists, nor the punch of a large body of contemporary neotonal music. Most of the pieces in the second half, whilst offering educational opportunities for the players, simply do not measure up against the artistic stature of the pieces in the first half. The modernist fragmentation found in the first half was more or less successful. Some of the passages were unnecessarily and incessantly complicated.
