Crystal has long made a speciality of the brass, and the woodwind, repertoire. The bulk of this disc derives from a 1981 LP – Crystal S230 – with the Persichetti Parable for Two Trumpets newly recorded and hot off the press. The selection generally showcases considerable technical dexterity and covers some compositional ground. There is understandably, given the date of the original LP, a strong body of work written in the middle to late 1970s; the earliest is the Satie Carillon Sonnerie, all nineteen potent seconds of it, which dates from 1921. The latest is Anthony Plog’s 1980 Four Concert Duets.

Bert Truax’s Adagio and Allegro for three trumpets especially appealed to me. It’s in subtly classical style with a full and rich slow fugue and a florid variational Allegro that turns and tumbles over itself delightfully. There’s plenty of registral exploitation in Henri Tomasi’s Suite with great colour, depth, tension and dance-like animation and élan. His concluding Danse Bolivienne has lashings of wit. Persichetti’s Parable for Solo Trumpet is a structured and intriguing narrative, terse and powerful, whilst that for Two Trumpets is more puckish than the solo work. It entwines, coils and is generally more contemplative and has a strong unison conclusion. The same is true of Britten’s Fanfare for St Edmundsbury, which is actually three fanfares played consecutively. Composer Stanley Friedman turns his Antiphonia IV into a pitch study with a melismatic effect and a singularity of tension throughout whilst Plog’s Duets are variously flourish-laden and muted, calm and sensitive and strikingly interjectory with jagged motifs by the second trumpet adding jazzy syncopations to the line. Of Stevens’ The Moudon Fanfares the most striking was the second, Fanfare B.I.M, with its "waspy" pitches, a piece that thrives on fractiousness and division. There’s a Satie like economy to his tribute to jazz trumpeter Clifford Brown, whose ethos he evokes in twenty seconds. Ulysses Kay’s Three Fanfares end the disc on a note of forthright confidence.

There are plenty of rewards for brass enthusiasts here in the ways in which the Fanfare can be used, subverted, extended and elaborated to fruitful musical effect.

Jonathan Woolf

 

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