Harvard University Band

Concert band has never been anyone's favorite musical medium. Composers shun it, music majors sneer at it, and conductors aspire to higher things. Plagued by a limited repertoire and a not-too-sophisticated audience, bands are usually reduced to playing Sousa marches and arrangements of the prelude to the second act of Lohengrin.

The Harvard Band at Sanders was a refreshing departure from this pattern. The group as a whole has a good sound, and its playing is intelligent, exciting, and musically satisfying. Jacketed in crimson, the Band reminded a motely but friendly and festive audience of grad students, alumni of the Band, Cambridge adults and their children - not the usual concertgoers around here - that it was a legitimate vehicle for musical ideas.

Conductor James Walker assembled a concert program that was sophisticated by anyone's standards. Except for the Sousa-like Emblem of Unity at the beginning, the pieces performed were thoroughly twentieth-century, ranging in date from Kurt Weill's Kleine Dreigroschen-musik (1929) to Dello Joio's Variations on a Medieval Tune(1963).

After the oldie-but-goodie Emblem came Darius Milhaud's unabashedly chauvinistic Suite Francaise. Written in 1945, the piece celebrates the five provinces where American and Allied troops, together with the French underground, "fought together for the liberation of my country." Each section employs folk tunes supposedly native to a particular province of France. Milhaud intended the suite to appeal to, and be playable by, high school bands across the country, and so the music is consciously straighforward and ingratiating. The Band gave it a properly spirited performance.

Weill's Suite from the Three Penny Opera was also played with the Band's characteristic energy. Here the group pared itself down even further, metamorphosing into a chamber wind ensemble. Unlike some other musical organizations, the Band can afford to do this, blessed as it is with a plethora of excellent soloists. In their hands the suite was a seductive brew of biting sarcasm and nostalgia - echt 1920's.

The major work on the program was Hindemith's Symphony in Bb(1951). This is the ne plus ultra of the band literature. It is music of real symphonic breadth and of imposing technical and interpretive difficulty. The humor in the piece, unusual for the effort of a German composer, was well brought out by the Band.

But in general, the Band had trouble coping with the Hindemith, evidencing flaws which were absent else-where. Hindemith takes a Straussian delight in piling up layers of motivic material, creating a massive and complicated fabric of sound. There are simply a lot of notes to get through, and often the Band gave the impression it was plowing through the music rather than performing it.

The Band's major flaw throughout the concert was an amateurish negligence about watching the conductor. There is little one can complain about in Walker's conducting; it is to him that much of the music's vigor and sensitivity of phrasing must be attributed. However, one felt he had to fight to keep the Band at the tempos he wanted.

At one point the blond mesomorph sitting next to me said, with great gusto, "One of the few things I really like here is the Harvard Band." Considering the adventuresomeness of the program, that's quite a compliment. For once the Band managed to communicate a sense of enthusiasm throughout the program, not just when playing the old standards. As a concert Band, the HUB is definitely coming of age.