Small Turnout for a Worthy Performance

IT IS A MYSTERY why the Harvard Concert Band sometimes attracts as relatively few listeners as it does, especially in light of its serious and effective performance last Friday night in Paine Hall.

Under conductor Thomas G. Everett, the Concert Band launched into Giovanni Gabrieli's brief Canzon septimi toni No. 2 (1597) for brass ensemble. Gabrieli designed the work as open-air music for Venice's Piazzi San Marco. The canzon is a work which really has a vocal-fugal style but is played instrumentally. From this standpoint the concert band evoked the antiphonal character of the piece effectively, with strong modulations and an acute sense of tone color.

The concert band's finest showing of the evening came in its execution of the Symphony No. 6 for Band, Opus 86 by Vincent Persichetti. A six-minute commission turned into a four-movement symphony and the work was handled by the group with all the full-bodied color and ensemble of a regular orchestra.

Persichetti, head of Juilliard's theory department, has woven an intricate piece of pervasive undercurrent themes and harmonies, based on fourth intervals rather than the traditional thirds. The concert band's playing was coordinated; not too restrained and quite fluid. Its mastery of contrasting ominous percussion in the opening Adagio and wild dynamics in the ensuing Allegro was conspicuous. The reflective, nicely sustained passages of the muted brass in the second movement, along with the fine ensemble of the baritone horns' tone color in the Allegretto showed that a concert band can indeed render a sensitive performance of a demanding work without the supportive strings of a full orchestra.

The concluding Vivace was delivered with commensurate verve and clash, the underlying percussion adding as much excitement to the finish as they had eeriness to the start.

"For a long time, I have had the idea of writing a composition fit for high school purposes and this was the result," Darius Milhaud said of his Suite Francaise (1945), his first extended work for winds. Milhaud's suite is written in five parts, named after French provinces in which the Allies and the French underground fought together against "the German invaders, who in less than seventy years have brought war, destruction, cruelty, torture and murder," as Milhaud wrote.

The Concert Band played these provincial folk tunes with singular enthusiasm and sensitivity, although the performance did not quite match that of the Persichetti symphony. The performers showed their versatility in the opening "Normandie," played with gusto, sprightly clashes of brass and a fine ensemble, and in "Bretagne," somber and haunting with a nice, accented contrast of low brass and shrill woodwinds.

There was almost an evocation of Paris bistros in "Ile de France," the third part, which was swooning and quick-paced, ending on a sudden clash but not as movingly played as the others. The reflective quality of the winds, controlled and temperate, suffused the grave "Alsace-Lorraine," which seemed most to beckon recollections of the Second World War. The Concert Band have a rather moving, swelling climax here, and the tolling of the drums came across well with contrasting dolefullness and sobriety amid the dance of the winds at the end. "Provence," the last part, contained the richest melodies, played cleanly with an ear for interesting counterpoint.

THERE SUCH AN ear for counterpoint is really needed was in Paul Hindemith's Symphony for Band, written in 1951 when the composer was 56. This work in three movements was written at the request of the U.S. Army Band, and maybe little else need be said. Actually, the Symphony for Band by Hindemith has become somewhat of a staple of the wind band repertoire, but its rendition by the Concert Band Friday night was not as even and impressive as in parts it showed potential to be.

The players embarked on the first movement with a good response to the contrapuntal themes and development which ran through this piece. It is marked "moderately fast, with vigor," and the group really did plunge into the work. Mighty drum rolls vied for attention with the forceful brasses. But the following Andantino grazioso was not so dynamic, and the listless tones detracted somewhat from the verve of the first movement.

Quickly remedying this flaw, the Concert Band found its former ensemble and enthusiasm in the ending Fugue, exhibiting just the right tone color which is contained in Hindemith's orchestration. The scope of the work--17 brass, 26 reeds and 3 percussion--was all the more evident in the Symphony in B flat as the group finished with polish and convincing togetherness.

Equal polish was apparent in the concluding work of the program Friday night, the light and diverting National Emblem March of E.G. Bagley. As through most of the other parts of the concert, particularly the Persichetti and Milhaud, the Concert Band rose to the full demands of tonal color and concerted playing. The trombones highlighted the instrumentation, and the piece was conveyed rather enjoyably--like the Gabrieli Canzon--with an obvious glee not always suitable in other parts of the concert.