01. Charles Ives: From the Steeples and the Mountains [4'24]
02. Samuel Barber: Mutations from Bach [5'41]
03. Roy Harris: Chorale for Organ and Brass* [12'49]
04.- 08. Virgil Thomson: Five Family Portraits for brass quintet [11'29]
09. Henry Cowell: Grinnell Fanfare* [3'05]
10. Henry Cowell: Tall Tale [4'19]
11.- 12. Henry Cowell: Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 12 for three horns [4'27]
13. Henry Cowell: Rondo [4'45]
14. - 16. Philip Glass: Brass Sextet [7'27]
17. Carl Ruggles: Angels for muted brass (1938 version) [3'06]
18. Elliott Carter: A Fantasy about Purcell's Fantasia upon One Note [3'15]
19. Charles Ives: Processional. Let there be Light* [2'42]
The London Gabrieli Brass Ensemble directed by Christopher Larkin with Christopher Bowers-Broadbent- organ*
Hyperion Helios CDH55018 (recorded July 1991; first issued as CDA66517 in 1992; this release 1999)
(digital download, flacs, booklet, cover and inlay scans)
Recording venue: All Hallows, Gospel Oak, London
Recording engineer: Anthony Howell; Producer: Mark Brown
Here's a superbly performed collection of American music for brass ensemble - strangely seldom performed and recorded by American ensembles. In particular, the first two and last items, Charles Ive's From the Steeples and the Mountains and Processional and Samuel Barber's Mutations from Bach are three of the finest examples of 20th Century music for brass.
I first heard the Ives and Barber works in a 1978 BBC radio broadcast from a Promenade Concert given in Westminster Cathedral by the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble and was blown away by this magnificent and, to me at the time, completely unknown music. No doubt the cathedral acoustic made the works sound even more evocative with the clangorous bells and brass of the Ives title work really seeming to float down from the steeples and mountains.
Eventually, this recording appeared in the 1990s, again from a British ensemble, and although it doesn't quite match the earlier experience, it is still very fine. Most of the other works on this disc match the quality of the Ives and Barber although the Harris Chorale is over-long and the early Glass Sextet is fairly plain (although more interesting than much of his later minimalist works).
Interestingly, the Virgil Thomson Family Portraits sound more modernist than the Ruggles and Elliott Carter.
Download from MEGA.
Appendix: I found a JPEG of the disc inlay card on the interweb after uploading the main file. A download can be found here.