VoxCarnyx

Perth Concert Hall

The format of The Fairey Band’s concert – overture, concerto, big work – was traditional, and the suspicion must be that it was a making a nice point about a brass band supplanting the usual symphony orchestra as Perth Festival’s gala closing event.

Perhaps that adventurous programming did not fill as many seats as the music deserved, but that was only a loss for those who failed to attend; the audience there had a sensational time.

The big work was Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, but not as anyone in the hall had seen it before, and as precious few will have heard it. Elgar Howarth’s arrangement of the suite for brass loses nothing of the excitement and pictorial splendour of the better known versions, especially Maurice Ravel’s. A convincing case might be made that it is every bit as good as that most familiar orchestral version, especially in the hands of a virtuosic ensemble like this one.

From the cornets to the tubas, by way of all the extra instruments beyond those we see in orchestras, there were colours and shades of timbre and tone that more than made up for the absence of strings and winds. Through the different incarnations of Promenade and the contrasting narratives of the canvases depicted, sections and individual soloists stepped into the spotlight.

Conductor Mark Heron – who was also a terrific verbal guide through the music – was on top of every detail but equally knew when, throughout the evening’s programme, there was nothing meaningful for him to add to the work of musicians playing together like a machine of meticulous engineering. As the band was born of Manchester aircraft-builder Fairey Aviation, that is only maintaining their tradition.

The visual element of the concert was a piece of hi-tech animation, created for conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony Orchestra in the USA, an outfit that develops young players at the start of their career. It is clever enough to adapt to a different arrangement of the work for a radically different ensemble and even adjusts to the pace of the performance.

More to the point, it was fantastic to look at, and not just in time with the music but narratively pertinent to the score, beginning with images of people in a gallery – a trope that would go on to morph through the ages – and then employ different styles of animation to create moving pictures responding to the titles of Viktor Hartmann’s paintings that had inspired Mussorgsky.

There was a vast distance between the moody darkness of The Old Castle and the children’s cartoon for Tuileries which followed, while the Ballad of the Chicks in their Shells was simply a hoot. It was a moment of levity before the menace of Catacombs and The Hut on Chicken’s Legs gave way to the glorious climax of The Great Gate of Kiev.

Amazingly this spectacle – a world premiere in the form we enjoyed it and a first screening of the film in Europe – did not completely overshadow the rest of the concert. That overture was Hector Berlioz’s La Carnival Romain, salvaged from his opera Benvenuto Cellini as an orchestral concert piece and, arguably, further developed as a showcase for brass instruments in Frank Wright’s glorious arrangement.

The concerto was Alexander Arutiunian’s Trumpet Concerto, a virtuoso showpiece for Iain Culross, feet firmly planted and fingers a blur on the valves. If the Berlioz was a French or Italian town band writ large, Arutiunian’s mid-20^th century music was global in scope, quoting Shostakovich but clearly aware of dance bands and movie scores on the other side of the Atlantic.

The Fairey Band even had a work to follow Pictures in Ray Farr’s arrangement of Bach’s best-known organ work, Toccata in D Minor. Here it was difficult not to be distracted from the brass by the precision-tooled work of the trio of percussionists, on everything from xylophone and kit to timpani and gong.

Keith Bruce