{TABLE} John Gay Suite .............................. Buxton Orr Concerto for piano & wind instruments ....... Stravinsky Music for Prague 1968 ....................... Karel Husa Paris Sketches .............................. Martin Ellerby Music for Wind and Brass .................... Macoochy Variations on a Korean folk tune ............ John Barnes Chance {/TABLE} THE career of the Czechborn American composer Karel Husa reached a peak in the late 1960s. His Third String Quartet of 1968 won him a Pulitzer Prize and his Music for Prague 1968, which reflected tellingly on the tribulations of the city of his birth, was widely taken up.
The "widely" is no exaggeration. The latest count I have to hand dates from 1992 and records no less than 10,000 performances. Husa followed his Prague piece with Apotheosis of This Earth (setting out to deal with "our problems of reckless living and destruction") and The Trojan Women (a ballet "on the eternal subject bf barbarism").
The wide dissemination of Music for Prague 1968 is not just a matter of its emotionally charged subject matter. The piece was written for concert band, and, in keeping with Husa's concern that music should reflect the time in which it was written, it brings to the generally rather conservative - not to say populist - concert band repertoire some of the more experimental compositional techniques of the 1960s.
Nearly 30 years on, the heartfelt concerns (expressed through bells, bellicosity, improvisation and a Hussite war song) were clearly discernible in the performance by the Irish Youth Wind Ensemble under James Cavanagh at the National Concert Hall on Saturday, though the musical detail didn't always register with precision.
Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments a difficult work to balance convincingly at the best of times suffered similarly, and Cavanagh too often allowed his ensemble to mask the punchily sharp edged playing of the soloist, Finghin Collins.
The three works conducted by visiting conductor Timothy Reynish (of the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester) were handled with greater musical persuasiveness and polish. The most finely integrated playing was to be found in the schmaltzy pastiche of Martin Ellerby's Paris Sketches, though the musical rewards of Elizabeth Maconchy's shorter, more concentrated Music for Woodwind and Brassware far greater.
