Tuba virtuoso and Fine Art Brass musician, Les Neish, reviews the latest release from A4 Brass - the young quartet taking the brass world by storm.

Having read many articles in social media and banding press regarding the A4 Brass Quartet recently, I looked forward to hearing the group’s debut album. With a list of awards already secured from the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, including the Phillip Jones Brass Chamber Music and Overall Ensemble Prize (the first brass group to achieve this), A4 is really making a mark. The ensemble’s principal players are from leading bands around the UK, so I was expecting a high level of individual technical ability and I was not let down.

What really struck me, however, was the incredible precision displayed by the ensemble throughout. Jonathan Bates’s Toccata provides an excellent curtain-raiser to the album showcasing the technical brilliance of A4’s members. From the rapid-fire opening,

Oliver Waespi’s quirky South Uist Variations includes some beautiful lyrical playing from Chris Robertson and Jamie Smith. Nigel Clarke’s humorous musical ‘whodunnit’ - A Musical Murder Mystery at the Bates Hotel, leads us into Edward Gregson’s Brass Quartet No. 2, originally written in 1968 and re-scored for the recording. This is everything you would expect from a Gregson work and the group plays with a real sense of maturity throughout.

A particular highlight is Tom Harrold’s energetic and rambunctious Craze, showing that this quartet can handle challenging, contemporary repertoire with ease. Martin Ellerby’s three-movement Electra Dances is a delight, featuring some elegant playing from Jonathan Bates in the middle movement and Michael Cavanagh excels in the third. The Heaton-inspired ‘...and has forgotten the gift’ by Robert Bushnell is another tour-de-force

although, for this listener, it felt rather similar to the previous works. Thomas Doss’s Moskito follows and the CD ends with another work by Jonathan Bates - the four-movement title track - Mists of the Mountains. Inspired by the Far East, the scene is set with the opening Gagaku (Japanese court music) and, after a scintillating Trans-Siberian Express trip, there is calm and serenity in the requiem featuring a CD backing track that works really well. The final movement, A Tale of Two Peaks, showcases a lot of technical work and the hymn-like ending is thoroughly enjoyable. There is no doubt that Jonathan Bates is a composing talent and a valuable asset to A4 Brass.

Overall, this is an interesting release from an exciting young group. There’s technical virtuosity in abundance, with energy and precision. As with many brass ensembles, creating tonal colours is always a difficult task, and I hope that this will be explored much further in future commissions and recordings. A large-scale project and a great debut album.

Programme: 4/5
Performance: 5/5
Recording: 5/5
Presentation: 4/5

Buy this CD here.

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