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Ballet for Band Eastman Wind

Ensemble A 1

Frederick Pennell

STEREO SRI 75138

BALLET FOR BAND

(goldenJmports

Side 1:

SULLIVAN PINEAPPLE POLL SUITE

1. Opening Number. 2. Jasper’s Dance. 3. Poll’s Dance. 4. Finale.

ROSSINI - RESPIGHI LA BOUTIQUE FANTASQUE

Danse Cosaque Nocturne Allegro non troppo Mazurka Taran telle Valse lente Can- C an

Side 2:

GOUNOD BALLET MUSIC FROM “FAUST”

Waltz Ensemble of Helen and her Trojan Maidens & Cleopatra and her Nubian Slaves Pas Seul of Cleopatra Entry of the Trojan Maidens Pas Seul of Helen Bacchanale 8c Entry of Phryne

EASTMAN WIND ENSEMBLE FREDERICK FENNELL, conductor

3:39 3:14 1:13 3:09

11:52

17:28

previously released by Mercury Records on SR 90256

Front: photo Michael Cardacino

The wind band has been one of man’s musical enterprises for approximately a century and a half. Its history during this turbulent period in instrumental metamorphosis is vague, confused, and inconclusive — in spite of which there exists a common acceptance of it as “the people’s choice” in a musical organisation. The orchestra, man’s great instrumental achievement, has also been his most successful musical enterprise. Its history has been free from turbulence and its metamorphosis is clear, orderly, and definitive. If there is any question that the band is “the people’s choice,” there is positively no doubt that the orchestra has always been the composer’s choice in a musical organisation. The entire history of large instrumental music rests upon this preference of the composer for the orchestra as the appropriate, the aesthetically desirable medium upon which to lavish or through which to express fertile, imperishable, and provocative musical ideas.

It must be stated that this preference for the orchestra has been entirely the composer’s own; no extra-musical forces have urged or obliged him toward it or any ensemble wherein the strings are the fundamental sonority. The correspondingly vast treasure-house of music written for the orchestra is the true reply of the composer to any questions about his preference for a medium.

The wind band, which is about two hundred years younger than the orchestra, began its existence as a service organisation, furnishing music for military and public occasions in the open air — the function for which it was designed and one which it still performs more satisfactorily than any other ensemble. It has never been without the music needed for the fulfillment of its military functions and what it needed for other occasions was borrowed freely from any handy source, appropriate or not.

When the great military bands of Europe and England began to emerge at the middle of the nineteenth century, the fame they sought was not that of military units in the performance of their authorised duties. They sought public recognition for their musical virtuosity, pure and simple, and they found it. Vast throngs turned out to hear visiting bands compete at international competitions; great names came forth: Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore and John Philip Sousa in America and the Godfrey family in England; great bands such as the Coldstream Guards, the Royal Artillery Band of England and the Garde Republicaine of Paris dominated the musical scene. The membership of the Garde was so powerful that it became the nucleus for the foundation of the Paris Conservatoire at the close of the eighteenth century. Its influence is strong to this day. Bands sprang up everywhere in the world that came under “Western” influences and there are more of them today than ever.

The most amazing fact of it, however, is that all this has been accomplished with the thinnest possible thread of connection to the source of all musical creation — the composer! To be sure, he has been present — and mostly without either his knowlegde or prior consent, but to a bandmaster or publisher, a tune that was good in an opera house could sound just as good in the park.

All the past great composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been exposed to the exemplary bands of the world, and until very recently, they have turned not only their backs but their ears in another direction. They have been silent as to their reasons — they just did not write any music for the band.

But this has seldom concerned the bandmaster, for he has always played a mostly borrowed literature anyhow, and his list of adopted musical literature is a vast and varied assortment of the standard classics of opera, ballet, symphonic suites, tone poems, concertos, symphonies — every form of musical composition known and practiced.

Bands in our country model their instrumentation on the pioneer bands of the British Army. The British music publishing houses had attractive catalogues of music for brass band and military band, which listed innumerable arrangements of the popular music of the day to be used both for concerts and dancing, the most attractive solos for cornet, the sure-fire novelties, marches, descriptive pieces and operatic potpourri’s, as well as some of the finest adaptations of the best orchestral music from all countries and composers. These were naturally strong forces for the inert “adoption” of the British Army Band instrumentation as the basis of the American concert and military band.

One of the most popular sources for the band’s borrowed music has always been the ballet. The three which constitute the repertory of this disc are outstanding examples of the transcriber’s art. All were fashioned by English bandmasters who know this art and practice it with consummate skill. The Complete Ballet Music which Charles Gounod (1818-1893) wrote for his opera Faust is recorded here in the instrumentation of William Winterbottom, Bandmaster of the Second Life Guards, who set it for the Chappell Army Journal,

probably as early as 1880. I acquired this set of parts from the personal library of the famous cornet soloist and bandmaster, Bohumir Kryl, who probably performed it in every park and seaside resort in America, when he travelled with his famous band fifty years ago. The music includes The Waltz from the Corps de Ballet; Ensemble of Helen; The Trojan Maidens; Cleopatra and Her Nubian Slaves; Bacchanale.

Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900), unbridled genius of the musical theater, was the son of a military band clarinetist who was the first professor of clarinet when the Royal Military School of Music (Kneller Hall) opened at Sandhurst in 1857. He did not write the ballet Pineapple Poll, recorded here for the first time in its setting for band by W.J. Duthoit. The ballet is one which Charles Mackerras assembled for the Sadler’s Wells Company from that vast hoard of compelling tunes which were Sullivan’s legacy to the world. Four excerpts from the Sullivan-Mackerras ballet are recorded here: Opening Number, Jasper’s Dance, Poll’s Dance, and Finale.

Another composer whose incomparable music was quickly adopted by bandmasters everywhere was Gioacchino Antonio Rossini (1792-1868). His operas, complete or in part, have long been standard band repertory. Rossini produced his thirty-six operas in nineteen years, beginning when he was eighteen years old. Ninety years later his countryman, Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936), seized upon piano pieces found in Rossini’s manuscripts and fashioned them into the highly successful ballet La Boutique Fantasque (“The Fantastic Toyshop”) (1919). Excerpts from this ballet (Danse Cosaque, Nocturne, Allegro non troppo, Mazurka, Tarantelle, Valse Lente, Can-Can, Andantino, and Galop) are recorded here in the masterful scoring of Dan Godfrey, one of England’s great adapters of music.

Notes by Frederick Fennell

OTHER MERCURY GOLDEN IMPORTS:

BRITISH BAND CLASSICS Works by Jacob, Walton, and Holst Eastman Wind Ensemble/Frederick Fennell SRI 75028

PERSICHETTI: DIVERTIMENTO FOR BAND GOULD: BALLAD FOR BAND SCHUMAN: GEORGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE BENNETT: SUITE OF OLD AMERICAN DANCES PISTON: TUNBRIDGE FAIR BARBER: COMMANDO MARCH Eastman Wind Ensemble/Frederick Fennell SRI 75086

WAGNER FOR BAND Eastman Wind Ensemble/Frederick Fennell SRI 75096

DELIBES COPPELIA (complete) Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra/Antal Dorati SRI 2-77004

This modern record can be played with every modern light¬ weight pick-up. The stereo sound, however, is reproduced only when stereo equipment is used.

Primed in The Netherlands