Search - William Mason, Edward MacDowell, Daniel Gregory Mason :: Vintage America: A Musical Meritage

Saucy, Melodic, Old-Fashioned American Wind Quintet Music

J Scott Morrison | Middlebury VT, USA | 09/12/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"[Disclaimer: I'm a pushover for wind quintet music. There is something about the uneasy combination of timbres that unfailingly engages my interest and admiration.]



I found myself having trouble getting beyond the first band on this delightful release from Albany Records featuring the playing of a Los Angeles-based wind quintet calling themselves 'Calico Winds.' I kept pushing the repeat button to hear it one more time. It's that rhythmically invigorating and melodic. The music presented here is almost all by Americans, some from among those first conservatory-trained American composers of the 19th-century: William Mason, his nephew Daniel Gregory Mason, and Edward MacDowell. The more recent composers tend to write in conservative style so that the most recent work, 'Sea Sketches' by the only non-American, Briton David B. Chadwick, could be mistaken for something by an early twentieth-century writer. Some of the pieces are skillful transcriptions for quintet: Mason's 'Dance Antique,' that infectious first band I'd mentioned; MacDowell's 'Fireside Tales,' William Grant Still's folk-song based 'Miniatures' and 'Folk Suite,' Scott Joplin's 'Two Rags' ('The Cascades' and 'Maple Leaf Rag'), and the rousing closer, Sousa's 'The Stars and Stripes Forever.' Indeed, the only works originally written for wind quintet are Daniel Gregory Mason's 'Divertimento,' Arthur Farwell's brief and delightful 'Prairie Miniature,' and Chadwick's 'Sea Sketches.' That latter, by the way, has a catchy setting of 'The Sailors' Hornpipe,' another piece I couldn't get enough of.



Calico Winds consists of five women: Eileen Holt Helwig, flute and piccolo; Rong-Huey Liu, oboe and English horn; Rachel Berry, horn; Kathryn Nevin, clarinet; and Theresa Treuenfels, bassoon. I'd never heard of this expert and musicianly group before, although I gather they have made at least one prior recording on the humorously named 'Occasionally Sober' label and containing music from Bach to Zappa. I expect we'll be hearing from them again, if we're lucky.



This is not profound music. This is joyful music. It's worth hearing, and more important, worth coming to love. A real keeper, this.



TT=62:00



Scott Morrison"