Playlist: Gramophone: Wind Ensemble

About Playlist

Philip Clark looks at works inspired by the timbral possibilities of wind instruments In this issue’s Musician and Score, Trevor Pinnock enthuses about the Gran Partita, Mozart’s inventive writing for a 13-piece wind ensemble continually catching him by surprise. Whether any of the composers included here consciously modelled anything after Mozart’s groundbreaking work is arguable; but all this exploratory music finds something fresh and wonderful from within the shape-shifting timbral possibilities of wind instruments. Berlioz’s Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale (1840) was apparently cut-and-pasted together in a couple of days from bottom-drawer sketches, mainly because Berlioz was indecently keen to bank his commission fee – but his fascination with wind sonority is clear for all to hear. Kagel aimed the satire of his caustic 10 Marches to Miss the Victory at precisely the sort of triumphalist nationalism Berlioz was evoking – a wickedly funny burlesque. Holst’s Suite was the first through-composed piece for military band, a British institution that had hitherto lent heavily on transcription, while Finnissy’s Giant Abstract Samba is the nearest he’s come to creating an Ebony Concerto. The Stravinsky, Messiaen and Xenakis works, meanwhile, repurpose longstanding harmonic and timbral obsessions, their music overriding what lesser composers might consider to be a reduced orchestral palette. This is visionary music that, like Mozart’s, just happens to be for winds.