Heat, light, the great emptiness of Space – it’s incredible how many different images the sound of brass instruments evoke in poets! Eugenio Montale says that when the lemons ripen to yellow “the songs of sun-kissed golden trumpets resonate in our chest”. Rimbaud, in his poem Vowels, relates the perfect circle of the letter O to a violet ray, a “sublime Trumpet full of strange piercing sounds, silences crossed by Worlds and by Angels...”.
The wind instruments’ ability to convey opposing or complementary sentiments was already appreciated in the early history of serious music. In 1636, in fact, the music theorist Marin Mersenne, in his Harmonicorum instrumentorum libri, invited trumpet players not to stop at warlike clangor but to imitate the gentler sounds of the human voice: Tubae militaris sonos non imitetur, magisque accedat ad vocis suavitatem.
The Canadian Brass have taken up this gauntlet in tonight’s program, crooning and warbling in a variety of languages, from the late Renaissance to Monteverdi, who invented the modern use of the brass in Orpheus. His sounds of sentiment and artistic splendour infused sensuality into the intellectual Florentine experiments in recitar cantando, even into Kurt Weill’s Brechtian surrealism in the 20th century. We must also tip our hats to Mozart’s infinite talents in opera and sacred music, to Rossini and Bizet’s theatrical archetypes and, of course, Gershwin’s blues in America.
Apart from the Toccata in Orfeo, which was originally intended as a fanfare for brass, a splendid curtain of sound announcing the theatre performances at court, most of these pieces are transcriptions – every musician’s “pain and delight”, whatever the instrument. Even the composer Ferruccio Busoni, a keen supporter of piano transcriptions, pointed out some of the traps in his Sguardo lieto, maintaining that since in all ages the majority are mediocre, for virtuosi players there was a never-ending flow of mediocre transcriptions, of the worst possible taste, and totally deforming their originals. However, it is worth taking the risk not only because, as someone said; “good, great, universal music remains the same whatever means you use to play it”. But particularly because “different means have different languages – each one it’s own – communicating this music in slightly different ways each time”.
So we shall see what new flavours emerge in Figaro’s sharp wit, the Queen of the Night’s stellar anger, Carmen’s fatal sensuality, and Mack the Knife’s brave ribaldry.

Marina Verzoletto