Posted by Rick Denney on December 21, 2001 at 08:58:07:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: please help us!!! posted by Randy Mac Iver on December 20, 2001 at 20:51:49:
In fact, I've listed to all the groups you mentioned, and admire them greatly. But let them sing a well-tuned major chord, and let a brass quintet play a well-tuned major chord, and the effect is different. Singers are looking for warmth, and brass quintets are looking for clarity.
That's why brass quintet works so well for Renaissance and Baroque music. That music is not about tone color, as in later music, but about structure and architecture. The clarity of a brass quintet is ideal for revealing this clarity. Vibrato can interefere with that clarity, it seems to me.
But I'm not doctrinaire on the subject, and I agree with most everything being said. I remember a performance by the combined forces of the Canadian Brass and the quintets of the New York Phil and the Boston Symphony. They played that quintessential work for strings, the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, composed by Vaughan Williams, and to my mind one of the great masterpieces of the 20th century. Vaughan Williams composed that work very soon after he had studied with Ravel, and from him learned to orchestrate "in points of color." That is utterly different from the structural aspect of Bach, and the juxtaposition of that rich sense of tone color with the Renaissance polyphony of Tallis is what makes that piece work so well. One would have thought that it would not work at all with brass instruments, given that the timbre of the work is so important. But, in fact, it worked amazingly well with those musicians. And they played with a lot of well-executed vibrato. Funnily enough, the best recording I've heard of that work (conducted by Adrian Boult), is played with very tight limitation of vibrato. Subtlety at work in both cases.
Rick "who realizes he is arguing with himself, heh, heh" Denney