TROBILNI KVINTET CONTRAST - BRASS QUINTET

Classical and Modern Music

Format: CD

Code: 114083

EAN: 3838898114083

The stories of success, cooperation, reciprocity, excellence and mutual understanding, as well as stories about hard work that ultimately leads to success, hold irresistible appeal. And this is exactly what one can find when listening to the excellently recreated music, featured on the Contrast Brass Quintet’s first CD. Even though it seems that nowadays, the musical education has globally become just an impersonal, self-feeding industry, which seems to endlessly and senselessly recycle that which is most noble in a person - their talent, what fortunately happens next is also that which cannot be prescribed, commanded or ordered, and which cannot at all be predicted. In the grip of this powerful machine, a group of people find each other; peers with similar or even the same professional inclinations, who attend the same educational institution. The latter more or less unintentionally brings them together as a group – perhaps with a completely pragmatic view of satisfying the program requirements of the institution, or even satisfying the working hour requirements of their mentor. And this is the moment when the magic begins! The peers begin to feel a connection with each other, and they, in that exact formation, cross the celebrated philosophical veil of the transcendent, entering the world of what even the clever marketing tactics of the supreme cannon of consumerism – that is, the credit card advertisement – refers to simply as "priceless".
It reads like a tale, but their internet presentation is as follows: The Contrast Brass Quintet is comprised of the graduates of the Academy of Music of the University of Ljubljana: Gregor Turk (principal trumpet player of the Slovenian National Opera orchestra), Blaž Avbar (a teacher at Waldorf Music School), Jože Rošer (principal horn player of the Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra), Žan Tkalec (trombone player of the Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra) and Uroš Vegelj (a teacher at Idrija Music School).
The members first gathered in 2012 and have since regularly held concerts in Slovenia (the Lent Festival, Festival Ljubljana, Imago Sloveniae, Musical Youth of Slovenia). Their repertoire includes renaissance, baroque and romantic music… all the way to ragtime and contemporary music. The Contrast Brass Quintet won the golden plaque and the first prize at the 2013 Slovenian Music Competition for Youth (TEMSIG) and became the absolute winner in the category of chamber groups at the 2014 Svirél. Their biggest success was winning the first prize at the 2014 International Jan Koetsier Competition for Brass Chamber Music in Munich; as an award, they also received a recording for broadcast for the Bavarian Radio.
And if we add the latest success to this bare but clearly expressive data - the first prize in the international competition “Giovani Musicisti – Citta di Treviso”, this reveals the image of something we call "a meteoric rise".
Of course, it is commanded by a very special and transcendental human chemistry, if not alchemy; but still, nothing happens without the preliminary talent, many years of expert work, the too many hours of joint practice and the unstoppable strive for artistic perfection. And all of the above is truly necessary to realize such a daring and demanding project as is the first medium of their recorded sound.
If we present the most laconic overview of the program, then we, excluding the adaptation of the famous Gallus’ "Ecce quomodo moritur", penned by Andrej Misson, can find at least three standard works of the original European and even global repertoire for the brass quintet. First, we have Brass Quintet No. 1, Op. 73, by the British composer Malcolm Arnold, who was also an excellent professional trumpeter in his youth. The piece, composed in 1961, for probably the then  “hottest” brass quintet in the world - The New York Brass Quintet – is undoubtedly among the most performed, popular and accepted-on-all-levels pieces of the kind. It is a musical work that in its own field holds the same importance as Haydn’s string quartets in their field. And if we compare Arnold’s quintet to Haydn’s quartets, Witold Lutosławski’s Mini Overture inadvertently brings to mind a connection to Beethoven’s work. The music giant of the 20th century composed this short, but extremely compelling piece in 1982, as a present for the fiftieth birthday of Ursula Jones, the spouse of Philip Jones – at the time, one of the most valued and recognized trumpeters and chamber musicians in the world. Philip Jones, and especially his famous Brass Ensemble, which performed in different formations – from the regular brass quintet to the even more renown brass ten-piece – are closely connected to the artistic fate of the brass music composed by Jan Koetsier, a Dutch composer, who worked in Bavaria for most of his nearly one hundred years of life. He composed his most renowned brass piece for Philip Jones – Symphony for Brass Tentet; the Brass Quintet, Op. 65, presented on this CD, is just one of many works he composed for said formation. The Contrast Brass Quintet “tackled” the piece during the preparations for the last year’s competition in Munich and – as you already know – won. The last is the most extensive and – in many ways – the most diverse and challenging piece: “Do you know Emperor Joe,” by the Austrian jazz vibraphonist and composer Werner Pirchner. The piece was created in 1986, and is by its design a sort of a collection of “sound haikus”, where the composer in a well-chosen and cute manner reveals the self-irony of the once magnificent area of the Hapsburg Empire. The sound medium of the brass quintet serves him for this purpose, as an excellent conductor for the cultural, national, religious and political collections that represented this, for a long time indestructible, formation. With all of this it appears that, despite the dedication of the piece to the emperor Joseph II, who was the only one dubbed as "people-friendly", the title itself remains only a witty wordplay that is easy to rhyme when pronounced in English, while the piece itself is substantial and is - in too many places - an extremely demanding sound collage both music - and performance-wise; a piece that was two decades ahead of its time, or it predicted, in a visionary manner, the today’s numerous Austrian brass ensembles, whose common denominator and trademark is also the sound sarcasm.
Finally, let us return once more to Gallus, to the track where trumpeters of the Contrast Brass Quintet, the ensemble that is decorated and distinguished also by playing music "by heart", replace the trumpets with flugelhorns and, in a beautiful harmony, conjure up a world of the renaissance vocal music, winning the audience’s and the expert juries' hearts.

May it last for a long time!!

Igor Krivokapič

TRACKS:

1             Witold Lutosławski: Mini Overture     2:39 (listen!)        

                Jan Koetsier: Brass Quintet, op.65                               
2             I              Andante con moto         3:19         
3             II             Andantino – Allegro molto – Presto      3:56         
4             III            Molto vivace     3:53            

5             Jacobus Gallus / Andrej Misson: Ecce quomodo moritur iustus       3:12

                Malcom Arnold: Brass Quintet, op.73                                
6             I              Allegro vivace  4:20         
7             II             Chaccone: Andante con moto   4:35         
8             III            Con brio              3:17         

                Werner Pirchner: Do you know Emperor Joe? PWV 13                   
9             I              Fine – Intrada   0:59         
10           II             Titellos                0:41         
11           III            Landleben          1:10         
12           IV           Nachmittag eines Vormittags   0:52         
13           V             Tanz der Salmonellen   1:19         
14           VI           Tetere – Tee      0:38         
15           VII          Schmalspur – Polka        1:03         
16           VIII         Wer Dir – Du schöner Wald – eine vor den Latz geknall?             1:09   
17           IX            Barfuß – Schuh – Platter              1:42         
18           X             Gia ma bold hoam!        1:31         
19           XI            Ja. Wir sind mit dem Radd hier!              1:04         
20           XII          Italienscher Sabeltanz  1:05         
21           XIII         Von Josef für Josef        1:31         
22           X             Idylle & Krawalle            2:18         
23           XI            Vom Leben (Dur & Moll)             2:35         
24           XII          Compliments to Great Britain   1:17         
25           XIII         Die Donau ist blau – wer nicht?               2:16