MUSIC REVIEW : A Judicious Blending of Brass, Organ

The combination of brass and organ seems a natural in terms of sonic compatibility and potential for decibel muscle. Surprisingly few composers, however, have exploited these two forces, and the resultant repertory is modest in both scope and depth.

But, against this modest backdrop, the Westwind Brass and organist Christopher Cook offered a respectable and judicious sampler of the genre Sunday evening at First United Methodist Church.

The concert’s opening and closing works most successfully exploited the potential for antiphonal grandeur between the large organ in the church’s rear gallery and the brass quintet, which was placed in the center of the chancel.

In Paul Dukas’ “Fanfare” and Eugene Gigout’s “Grand Choeur Dialogue,” both forces stylishly captured the drama and fire of the French Romantic idiom. In a more contemporary vein, Czech composer Vaclav Nelhybel’s Fantasy on the chorale “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” sparkled with cleanly executed counterpoint, appropriately scaled for the composer’s sober neoclassical style.

On its own, Westwind gave a highly polished reading of Viktor Ewald’s “Symphony for Brass.” With an abundance of sleek dynamic shadings and snappy tempos, the quintet captured the work’s Edwardian pomp and symphonic aspirations.

The group needed a distinctly different approach, however, to make musical sense of J. S. Bach’s “Contrapunctus IX” from “The Musical Offering.” The quintet’s speed, surface polish and minimal articulation put Bach’s intricate lines into the blender and came out with a bland contrapuntal puree. The quintet’s Giovanni Gabrieli “Canzona” with Cook suffered from the same problem of breathless tempo and monochromatic phrasing.

The quintet’s strengths include a cohesive and finely tuned ensemble. In the spongy acoustics of the large church, the low end of the quintet--Laurence Brady on horn, Ronald Robinson on trombone and Lorin Getline on tuba--projected the most alluring sonorities, while the two trumpets, David Sabon and Michael Walk, seemed to lack brilliance and focus in their timbre. Robinson demonstrated his facility and lyrical playing in Franz Liszt’s curious arrangement of an aria from Rossini’s grand choral work, “Stabat Mater.”

Cook’s brief tour of solo organ repertory included a broadly scaled, confident rendering of Max Reger’s arch-Romantic “Introduction and Passacaglia” and a triptych of lighter English pieces. Of the three, Simon Preston’s brilliant “Alleluyas” proved most intriguing, although Preston’s stylistic debt to Olivier Messiaen is so obvious, the latter should receive a portion of Preston’s royalties.

A substantial audience of roughly 500 attended the concert, the first program in the church’s ambitious annual concert series.