LAST August, attention was being drawn - repeatedly - in this space to the quality of the woodwind music of Richard Strauss. (The reason at the time was that the Chamber Orchestra of Europe soloists, at the Edinburgh Festival, were playing everything Strauss had written for the genre.) These were no minor works, but, albeit in a condensed format, major pieces encapsulating all of the characteristics that colour his operas and symphonic poems.
All of that came back to mind yesterday as the students of the Academy Wind Ensemble, under director David Davies, performed the opus 7 Serenade in E flat, What a gorgeous piece of music it is: a miniature masterpiece of harmony, interweaving melodies, and ravishing colours. And, while short on the absolute gleam and glow that should mark performances of the work, the students gave a more than creditable performance of music in which clarity is fiendishly difficult to achieve.
The strength of that performance lay in its fastidious attention to an elegance of phrasing and shaping which kept the structure of the work lucid, while not sidelining - as if such a thing were possible - the music's incredibly voluptuous curves. And what such a sumptuous soundworld also achieved was the highlighting of the utterly clean lines and classical shapes of Mozart's E flat Divertimento, which followed the Strauss.
The shift from the heady, swooning romanticism of one to the compact, pure, freshwater clarity of the other represented superb programme planning, which was continued then in Dvorak's wonderful D minor Serenade with its lyrical, robust, and often folksy elements. The performance here was less polished, though, again, the character of the music was there.
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