Katrina
November 29 2008
Katrina Marzella (Baritone) with Leyland Band and John Wilson (Piano)
CD 24999
When it comes to brass band soloists, cornet and euphonium players have traditionally hogged the limelight, and the contemporary ‘giants’ of these instruments, like Roger Webster, Martin Winter, Richard Marshall, David Childs, David Thornton and Steven Mead, have been mainly responsible for the cornerstone recordings of recent years.
When it comes to brass band soloists, cornet and euphonium players have traditionally hogged the limelight, and the contemporary ‘giants’ of these instruments, like Roger Webster, Martin Winter, Richard Marshall, David Childs, David Thornton and Steven Mead, have been mainly responsible for the cornerstone recordings of recent years. Great exponents of the horn, trombone and tuba have also had their share of the spoils, but no great impression on the brass recording market has ever been made by a baritone soloist - until now!
There have, of course, been great baritone players in the past, like John Slinger and Peter Christian of Black Dyke fame, and there still are plenty of excellent ones around in our leading Championship Section bands, but even the title of this album alludes to the fact that there is only one Katrina. To use a sporting analogy, Katrina Marzella is the Bob Beamon of the baritone – the one who took a discipline and extended its horizons like no other has before, reminiscent of the great American long jumper, who blew the athletics world apart when he smashed the existing record in his chosen discipline by nearly two feet at the Mexico Olympics in 1968.
Martin Ellerby’s Concerto for Baritone is the first work on the recording. Commissioned in 2007 by the soloist, it was written to be ‘specifically a baritone concerto and not a euphonium concerto masquerading as the former’. After an energetic and colourful opening Fusions, the second movement, Soliloquy, contains some of the most beautifully sensitive playing that this listener has heard on any brass instrument and alone is worth the purchase price of this disc. The lively Tangents closes the work, which will surely become one of the most important in the baritone repertoire in the years ahead. The familiar Donegal Bay receives characteristically elegant treatment from the soloist and she continues to display great artistry in Pedro Iturralde’s Pequeña Czarda, in which the opening melody is followed by a Greek-style dance that builds up to a spectacular finale.
John Wilson is the accompanist for the following two works (Leyland Band is the accomplished accompanying group on the rest of the disc), Saint Saëns’ The Swan and Rachmaninov’s Lied, which are subtly handled by both performers.
Philip Harper’s haunting A Hebridean Lullaby allows the performer to demonstrate her affinity with her maternal ancestors’ homeland (her father is of Italian extraction, clearly the perfect recipe for a baritone player!), before perhaps the most fascinating work in the collection, Torstein Aagaard-Nilsen’s Feber-Fantasi, a piece originally written for euphonium, in which the soloist is accompanied only by nine cornets.
Among Katrina Marzella’s many achievements were the back-to-back British Open and Ern Keller solo titles that she won in the past two years, and the piece that she performed en route to these victories, Concerto per Flicorno Basso by Ponchielli, is appropriately featured as the finale to this truly outstanding collection by a unique player and musician. By way of an encore, the Eva Cassidy-inspired Over the Rainbow serves confirmation (as if it were needed) that Katrina’s lyrical playing could almost bring a tear to a glass eye and that, in the proper hands, even the humble baritone can be way up high.
Kenneth Crookston
British Bandsman, Saturday 29th November 2008
