Harvard Band and Wind Ensemble

The Harvard Band, like 1066, is a Good Thing. At halftime it runs all over the football field sparking otherwise flagging spirits. And I've always admired the imperiousness with which its assumes control of Boylston Street at will.

As a musical organization the band's handicaps are legion. Faced with playing the dual role of School and Concert band, the group suffers from problems of identity, as well as conflict of interest and rehearsal time. Then there is the added problem of the basically limited repertoire of works originally composed for band. Nevertheless, conductor James Walker always manages to put together an adventuresome program that depends remarkably little on John Philip Sousa.

Friday night, the Band gave the first in a projected series of free concerts in Sanders Theater. I generally find the sound of a concert band a refreshing change from the usual orchestral or chamber music fare, but this time I'm afraid the Band was not up to snuff. Only a week beyond the end of the football season and undoubtedly depressed by the sight of a bare hundred people scattered sparsely through Sanders Theatre, the Band sounded dispirited and underrehearsed. Intonation throughout the concert was of the sickly sort one expects from a band but which the HUB usually avoids. In the first half, it was all the Band could do to get through the notes, let alone do anything with them. This was particularly noticeable in the Hindemith Konzertmusik fur Blasorchester, the most massive and probably the most difficult work on the program. There are always a lot of notes in Hindemith and the Band's performance exposed serious problems of ensemble. Walker was often reduced to signalling huge downbeats in an effort to get his musicians together again. Problems of execution obscured most of the composition's mordant sense of humor. The one saving grace was the frequent konzertante nature of the writing, which provided an opportunity for some brave solo work by flute, saxophone, and trumpet.

The Band shared the program with a group officially known as the Harvard Wind Ensemble, comprised of one or two Band members and the star winds from the HRO and Bach Society. Here there is no problem of multiplication of mistakes through numbers, and the group certainly contains some of the university's best wind talent.

But in their performance of Richard Strauss's Serenade for Thirteen Winds they sounded and appeared every bit as unrehearsed as the full Band. This work of the sixteen-year-old Strauss is a straightforward exercise in the academic, conservatory style of the late nineteenth-century. The opening theme is a cross between the Schumann piano concerto and piano quartet, and the rest is not only warmed-over, but decadent Mendelssohn. It is a delightful work in its way, but to succeed it requires complete control and attention to detail that the ensemble, heads buried in the music, was not prepared to give. The group was often not quite together and tended to play at a consistent mezzo volume. On the whole their performance was earnest but dull.

The second half of the program was a definite improvement over the first. Both the works had been played at previous concerts, and performances were generally brighter and more confident. The Wind Ensemble reappeared with Robert Kurka's Suite from The Good Soldier Schweik. This basically tonal work, composed in 1956, treads perilously close to eclecticism as it attempts to combine all the classic styles of twentieth century music: the playful dissonance of Prokofieff, the biting sarcasm of Mahler, a Milhaud-like use of jazz, and insistent rhythms at once reminiscent of Igor Stravinsky and Leonard Bernstein. Combined with the nearly contemporary Town Piper Music of Richard Mohaupt (for the full Band) the work gave the second half of the program a decidedly Broadway cast. In both works Walker and the Band had an opportunity to exhibit the vitality and rhythmic drive that always make them worth hearing.

The evening's chief flaw that there was too much tooting and not enough musicianship. I tend to give the Band the benefit of the doubt, though, and hope that next time, with more rehearsal, lavish praise will again be appropriate.