Live Music Now Scotland: Emerging Artists Series: Slideshow Trombone Quartet
Usher Hall - 04/12/23
As a fan of brass music the prospect of hearing a trombone quartet is very appealing. The audience of 113 which nearly fill the organ gallery in the Usher Hall clearly agree with me, and today’s concert provided a promising start to the Emerging Artists winter series, and to the Usher Hall’s Christmas festivities.
Joshua Parkhill, Robyn Anderson, Symone Hutchison and Min Khai Khoo are a Glasgow-based group founded in 2018 by friends attending the Junior Conservatoire. Since then they’ve graduated from the RCS BMus Performance degree course, winning this year’s David James Brass Prize. Individually they’ve freelanced with the BBC Scottish Symphony orchestra, the RSNO, Scottish Opera, the Ulster Orchestra and the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra.
They begin their concert with the celebratory ‘Achieved is the Glorious Work,’ from Haydn’s Creation in an arrangement by Donald Miller, and follow this with the beautiful slow harmonies of ‘Evening Prayer’ from Humperdinck’s ‘Hansel and Gretel’. As I’ve learned from Tom Service’s ‘The Trombone Section’, available on BBC Sounds, the trombone’s ability to mimic the human voice meant that it was used to accompany church choirs for hundreds of years before its appearance in symphony orchestras in the late 18th century. In these opening pieces we can hear the power of the instrument in religious music originally for the voice.
Although most of the group’s repertoire are arrangements, they also play a modern work written for trombone quartet, the ‘First Trombone Concerto’ by Dutch composer, Saskia Apon. The players explore her haunting theme on muted and unmuted instruments, creating some unusual harmonies. Min Khai Koo plays bass trombone, while the others are on alto trombones. Next he introduces his own arrangement of ‘Highland Cathedral,’ a tune, surprisingly perhaps, written by German musicians, Michael Korb and Ulrich Roever for a Highland Games in Germany in 1982. This excellent arrangement was first heard at the National Galleries of Scotland at the Quartet’s recent concert and is intended as a tribute to Landseer’s ‘Monarch of the Glen.’
There’s fun and some in-jokes, I suspect, in Isobel Dawes arrangement of David’s Trombone Concertino, a popular competition piece, chosen no doubt for its technical demands. The players make light of these in various guises from a raucous wrong-note version to some trad jazz. Next up are two jazz song arrangements, Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Georgia on My Mind’ and (my favourite piece in the concert) John Kander’s ‘New York, New York, both played with polish and panache. Tom Service’s programme didn’t cover the jazz trombone, but RSNO regulars may recall Nathaniel Shilkret’s exciting ‘Trombone Concerto’ played in 2010 by the orchestra’s Principal Trombone, Dvur Jull Magnussen. Written for jazz trombonist, Tommy Dorsey, the work was rediscovered by former RSNO trombonist Bryan Free – read the fascinating story here. Time for another performance by one of this quartet?
We’ve now reached the Christmas selection with a wistful ‘In The Bleak Midwinter’ and a cheerier ‘Carol of the Bells’, and a nice arrangement of Loch Lomond to finish. After well-deserved applause, Min Khai Koo introduces the encore ‘Let it Snow.’ Optimistically he suggests that we may already have had our snow for the winter…
Listen to The Slideshow Trombone Quartet on their YouTube page, and look out for the other three Emerging Artists concerts, Cordes en Ciel on 15th January, Lark Duo on 22nd January and The Fountaineers on 29th January, all at 11am in the Usher Hall.
