Toru Takemitsu, Harrison Birtwistle, Hans Werner Henze, Elgar Howarth

Featuring: The Grimethorpe Colliery Band

condition (record/cover): NM / EX
Insert included.

One of the more remarkable LP documents of the early Decca HEAD series, and a record whose interest lies as much in its cultural improbability as in its musical content. The Grimethorpe Colliery Band - a Yorkshire brass band with a history stretching back to 1917, rooted in the mining community of the West Riding - had, by the early 1970s, become through the advocacy of Elgar Howarth, its conductor, a vehicle for new music of genuine seriousness. Three major composers were invited to write for it. Harrison Birtwistle's Grimethorpe Aria (1973) is the most celebrated result: a sustained, elegiac meditation for brass and percussion that transforms the band's collective sound into something monumental and deeply affecting, its repetitive, accumulating processes generating the kind of emotional weight that Birtwistle achieves when he is most fully himself.

Hans Werner Henze's contribution and that of Toru Takemitsu explore the same instrumental forces with the very different sensibilities their respective traditions demanded - Henze's political passion finding in the band's working-class origins a subject of genuine resonance, Takemitsu's exquisite textural intelligence producing something more oblique and more mysterious. Howarth's conducting unifies what might have seemed incompatible into a coherent and important document. Decca, HEAD 14.