Going for a Brass Ring : Classical music: For 23 years, the Canadian horn quintet has enjoyed making accessible arrangements--in defiance of purists.

Imagine doing your best to make classical music more accessible, and then coming under fire for it.

The members of Canadian Brass, though universally conceded to be at the top of their field in terms of music-making, have suffered their colleagues’ slings and arrows for just that subversive activity.

Guilty as charged, says Canadian Brass trumpeter Ronald Romm, whose group performs Sunday in Costa Mesa under the auspices of the Orange County Philharmonic Society.

“They’re jealous,” he said by phone from his home in Clearwater, Fla. “You see the program. It’s very serious in terms of the music we play--music by Bach, Gabrieli, contemporary composers. We just take the mystery and boredom out of the concert. It’s the in-between pieces, the introductions, that make it interesting for the masses.”

Besides Gabrieli’s Canzona, “La Spiritata,” and Charles Ives’ Variations on “America,” the program includes arrangements of the Overture to Mozart’s “Magic Flute”; “Summer” from Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons”; music inspired by Bach’s “Anna Magdalena Notebook,” and highlights from Verdi’s opera “Rigoletto.”

Could it be that their detractors object to all those arrangements of compositions not written for horns? Purists, of course, would prefer “The Four Seasons” played on violins.

If so, they’d better take issue with the Gabrieli work as well, according to Romm, 47. For although Gabrieli wrote his pieces for sackbuts (an early version of the trombone) and natural trumpets, they didn’t sound anything like contemporary instruments either.

“In order to actually make an authentic treatment, you’d have to only play contemporary music,” Romm said. “But great music is great music. It should be played on as many vehicles that will carry it. What are the purists being pure about (except) their own stuffiness?”

The Canadian Brass--Romm and Frederic Mills, trumpets; David Ohanian, horn; Eugene Watts, trombone, and Charles Daellenbach, tuba--is credited with establishing the brass quintet as a viable concert medium.

They’re hoping to establish it as something more than viable.

“We want people to keep coming to concerts, and not 50 at a time,” Romm said, “more like 5,000 at a time. There’s always a basketball game with 10,000 people going and a football game with 50,000. And people can stay home and watch the tube. We have to be interesting in our concerts. Is that wrong? I don’t think it’s wrong.”

It’s how they make their concerts appealing that also bugs purists.

“We have a good time,” he said. “We poke fun at ourselves. We do opera, for instance. . . . To portray the characters, we do what we can. We dress up in wigs.”

Besides performing and recording, the Canadian Brass has grown to include successful publishing (of music and arrangements for brass) and instrument-manufacturing enterprises. The group’s discography now numbers 30; its latest release was an album of Wagner for brass on the Philips Classics label, and Gabrieli is next. Tours this season include the United States, Canada and Europe.

The various business concerns hardly detract from one another.

“The music we publish is the music we perform,” he said. “The instruments we sell are the instruments we play. The business of the business is improving nicely--(especially) keeping in mind that musicians are never taught the business of the business.”

According to Romm, sales of brass instruments are doing well in general, and, as might be expected, he thinks highly of the group’s own line.

“We’ve spent the last 23 years playing every brand of instrument, learning what we could learn,” Romm said. “Before, you either had an easy-blowing instrument with a bright, thin, edgy tone, or you had a nice sound that was hard to blow. To have an easy-blowing instrument, you had to sacrifice fullness. That’s no longer the case.”

The quintet asked a family-owned concern in Wisconsin to make trumpets, trombones and tubas to its specifications, and European companies to make euphoniums and French horns. The handcrafted instruments--except for the more-expensive tuba that can cost in “the thousands but not several thousands” of dollars--today bear the name Canadian Brass Musical Instrument Co.

Romm invites musicians to sample the wares: “Tell the brass players to bring their mouthpieces to the concert. If there isn’t a display (of the instruments) at the hall, tell them to bring them anyway--they can try mine.”

Because of the group’s business acumen, it has been asked to help prepare students for music-world realities.

“Often we’re parachuted into music schools to talk about the music business, simply because we’ve learned about it,” Romm said. “We talk about programming, about dealing with the sponsor and symphony orchestra union rules.

The string quartet as a chamber music ensemble dates back centuries, the brass quintet only decades. While it’s hard to imagine a string quartet donning wigs for an opera spoof, Romm doesn’t attribute his group’s antics to adolescent silliness.

“The brass player has a different personality from a string player,” he said. “But you have to consider other factors, starting with repertoire. Early jazz and Dixieland, that’s our classical repertory. We can go out there and play music of Duke Ellington and play this music proudly as our American classical music. Forty years ago, Gershwin was Broadway material. Now it’s at the Metropolitan Opera.”

And 23 years ago, the Canadian Brass was somewhat Canadian. Daellenbach taught at the University of Toronto, and Watts played in the Toronto Symphony. Romm, however, grew up in Los Angeles--he attended Westchester High School and USC--and Mills is the only member of the group who was born in Canada. Their offices are in Wisconsin and all live in Florida.

Conceded Romm, “Now we’re the international Canadian Brass.”

* The Canadian Brass performs Charles Ives’ Variations on “America,” Dixieland selections by Luther Henderson and a bevy of arrangements Sunday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets, $11-$30. Phone (714) 553-2422.