MUSIC REVIEW : Brass Quintet Fails to Shine

It isn’t easy being a brass quintet.

Your repertory is small and generally measly in quality. It consists mostly of music from two disparate time periods, the Renaissance and the 20th Century. Few sustained works of value are included--no Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Stravinsky, etc.--so that brass quintet programs necessarily are made from snippets that often are incongruous, and arrangements of music meant for other instruments.

It is difficult to fashion a satisfying and nourishing program from such hodgepodge fare, and so it was for the New York-based Eastern Brass Quintet, now 21 years old, Saturday at Orange Coast College’s Robert B. Moore Theatre. What other instrumental combination would even consider following Karl King’s circus march, “Cyrus the Great,” with Contrapunctus IX from “Art of the Fugue” by Bach?

Add to that some recent changes of personnel--among them, the loss of the group’s trombonist of five years, Ted Toupin, who died just two weeks ago (the concert was dedicated to him)--and you have the makings of a musically ho-hum evening. Enjoyable in parts to be sure, but a less-than-filling whole.

The group--Richard Green and Rich Clymer, trumpets, Peter Reit, horn, Gary Capetandes, trombone, Morris Kainuma, tuba--began with an early-music set including a graciously flowing Fantasia by Orlando Gibbons arranged for horn and tuba, and culminating in a warm and resounding “Qui risi tirsi” by Monteverdi.

Sprinkled about the program were arrangements of American music, most satisfying among them being the three-ring cheerinesses of two Karl King marches, the somber “Magnetic Rag” by Scott Joplin, and a gratefully arranged and richly played suite from Edward MacDowell’s “Woodland Sketches.”

Throughout the evening, despite ample displays of virtuosity, there were signs of group unsettledness: occasional intonation problems, mismatched articulations, some ragged ensemble. Individually, too, the players seemed not in top form; cracked notes and bumbled passage work regularly dotted the concert and sometimes fatigue, or what sounded like it, set in. An edge of excitement was missing.

Perhaps this was most evident in the only original brass quintet piece on the program, Eugene Bozza’s Sonatine. To come off at all, this derivative, flashy music must be airtight in execution, its numerous dovetailing trade-offs as seamless as if played on a single instrument. Though the Eastern’s performance proved never less than professional, it was not up to the demands of the music.