Opening this evening’s concert is the Amor Marsch, Johann Strauss’s joyful, pompous, fast march.   Strauss, the incomparable composer of some of the world’s best-known Viennese music, immediately shows off the extraordinary timbre of the brass quintet in this piece.
The Fugue in G minor, a form where Bach is the most brilliant composer in the history of music, is presented here in an arrangement by the Canadian Brass ensemble. The different instruments alternate and intertwine continuously until they meet up in the finale in a resolving chord that should be in G minor, considering the prevailing key of the piece, but actually uses a Picardy third to end in a happier mood.
Russian ballets are generally visualized as an example of composure, discipline and grace, but in this free arrangement for the Pentabrass, Davide Sanson, trumpeter and composer, sets an ironic and almost irreverent tone, as you can guess from the title: The swan cracks the nuts before sleeping – mixing much-loved tunes from three of Tchaikovsky’s famous ballets.
The first part of the program ends with a suite composed specially for this group of instrumentalists by André la Fosse, a trumpeter himself, and an international teacher in the world of arrangements and composition for brass. The four movements of the suite are all marked by a particularly French sobriety, alternating melancholy and martial pieces, ending up with a breathtaking sequence that is enough to tax any player.
The Suite Americana by Enrique Crespo, a Latin American musician who has done important work in Europe, offers in its four movements various compositions inspired by geography and history: there is ragtime, bossa nova, Peruvian waltz, and music from Mexico to give us a radiant vision of the folk sounds of South America.
Like all jazz classics, revised and arranged by the various musicians who perform them, Tuxedo Junction as interpreted by this quintet aims for sound and timbre to match the expression of jazz in general, like in the well-known suite from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. The American musical, based on “gang warfare” – an update of Shakespeare’s plots – develops a symphonic orchestral sound, that Gershwin employed earlier, making more “up to date” use of typical classic strategies.
In the unforgettable melodies by these two composers that Pentabrass presents tonight, divided by an ironic, mischievous Tango by Short, there is the clear influence of the sound of the big bands of Duke Ellington and Count Basie.

Ugo Favaro