Wind Players In Dress Whites
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Mothers, don’t let your babies grow up to be wind players. Work is difficult to find, as the great tradition of the concert band and wind ensemble disappears from the American scene as inexorably as once did the buffalo.
One notable exception to this trend is the armed services, each of which still possesses at least one fine musical organization. One of the finest appeared on Friday evening at Weill Recital Hall as the United States Coast Guard Band, stationed at New London, Connecticut, and founded by, among others, Walter Damrosch and John Philip Sousa, split into various iterations for a night of chamber music.
Vincent Persichetti is a superstar in this arcane repertoire, and his Symphony No. 6 is one of the undeniable classics of the literature. Chief Warrant Officer Richard E. Wyman led a tight performance of his Serenade for Wind Quintet and Brass Quintet. What is immediately noticeable about these players, besides the dress whites, is their excellent posture and discipline. The piece is a quintet of aural vignettes that blends the two group sonorities, the French horn in each designed for very different harmonic functions. The performance was a solid one, although one of the trumpets had a rather rough outing.
In a classical concert, the term “clarinet quartet” can mean strings and winds and may even include a piano, but here four clarinets — one E Flat, two B Flat, and one bass — offered a splendidly unified reading of Four for Four by the Latin American composer Jorge Montilla. Anton Webern composed the great saxophone quartet of the last century, and it was clear that it was an influence on Samuel Adler, whose piece “Line Drawings after Mark Tobey” was realized by a foursome of soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone saxes. The timbral combinations were quite colorful and the second drawing reminded, with its occasional flashes of light, of the ordered but atavistic world of Piet Mondrian.
Fuminori Tanada’s “Mysterious Morning II” was an earsplitting and ultimately annoying compendium of random tootings and repetitive arpeggiated material, but the very well known Mladi (Youth) of Leos Janacek was a better test of these players and their excellent level of skill. The group (Elizabeth Detweiler Jackson, flute and piccolo, Stephen Wade, oboe, Chantal Hovendick, clarinet, Andrew Grenci, bass clarinet, Brooke Allen, bassoon, and Aimee Page, horn) produced a superb performance, virtually note-perfect and masterfully understated for maximum emotional impact. Little touches such as precise cross rhythms and consistent unison stops, were refreshing reminders of their professionalism.
Those listeners familiar with Connecticut geography might have assumed that Colchester Fantasy by Eric Ewazen was written just a few miles inland from New London, but the composer was in England at the time. The piece, for brass quintet, was charmingly colorful, this composer having established a name for himself in the esoteric brass world as a polychromatic tone painter. Sadly, this effort was the least satisfying of the evening.
Finally, we enjoyed a small taste of what the entire ensemble can sound like, as Commander Kenneth W. Megan conducted the Suite in B Flat for Thirteen Winds of Richard Strauss. This is not the much more famous Serenade but rather its companion piece, suggested to the composer by conductor Hans von Buelow. This was a lively reading that made this listener yearn for that spacious full sound that I have experienced back home in Connecticut, for there are few bands currently blowing that can play Sousa better than this venerable group.