Dalewool Auckland Brass has extra polish

By WILLIAM DART

Dalewool Auckland Brass is one of the city's best-kept musical secrets, although it has been with us for almost a century. It started life in 1919 as the Auckland Watersiders' Silver Band and during the 80s and 90s raked in national and international titles as the Continental Airlines Auckland Brass, and Fosters Auckland Brass.

Welshman Nigel Weeks has led them through the past eight years. A versatile musician and "a quite acceptable hand at the trombone", Weeks has sung in the chorus of the NBR New Zealand Opera and is King's College music director.

He feels that, despite the phenomenal success of the movie Brassed Off, "people still think of brass bands as marching down the street or playing hymns in the park, but they're much more than that".

Weeks points to Frank Wright's arrangement of Verdi's La Forza del Destino overture, one of the featured items when the band shares the stage with the Auckland Philharmonia on Thursday and suggests, provocatively, that "Verdi and Berlioz sometimes sound better played by the brass band than they do by an orchestra".

The Dalewools are not afraid of tackling New Zealand music. The band's most recent album, Variations, featured Saxon, a work they commissioned from Wellington composer John Psathas.

Weeks remembers, with a chuckle, how Psathas seemed "to throw semiquavers from one end of the band to the other" and admires the way the young composer "managed to interweave the traditional and modern styles within the one piece".

This week the band takes centre stage in Europa, a new concerto written by the Auckland Philharmonia's resident composer, John Rimmer. "It's a contemporary piece but, in many ways, some of the writing is fairly conservative."

In April, Rimmer organised canzonas by the 17th-century composer Gabrieli to be played in the Maidment Theatre foyer during the season of his opera Galileo. I ask whether the sonorous world of this Venetian composer had been revisited in Europa.

"Quite possibly," he replies. "There are some lovely chordal sections which make great use of muted instruments, and the players have to listen so carefully to get the right placement in those chords. It's all a matter of tuning and balance."

A concerto wouldn't be a concerto without a cadenza, and Rimmer has written a few in Europa. Weeks alerts me to Andrew Large's cornet turn, Nigel Seaton's flourishes on E flat tuba and a "marvellous moment when Matthew Norwell's euphonium persuades a quartet of tubas to join the action. So often the orchestra seems to be going down one road and the brass band seems to be going down another - at last they're on the same highway."

After they've packed away their instruments on Thursday, the Dalewool players will dust off their show tunes for their Showtime concert at Sky City Theatre on June 23. Watch out, too, for August's Night of the Cossacks.

* The Dalewool Auckland Brass, with the Auckland Philharmonia under Miguel Harth-Bedoya, play John Rimmer's Europa: Concerto for Brass Band and Orchestra, Auckland Town Hall, Thursday, 8pm.