Imaginative and Challenging Music by Philip Wilby - heard by PATRIC STANDFORD 'Nothing stands still for long ...'

Although Philip Wilby was for several years a violinist with the Covent Garden and Birmingham Symphony orchestras, it is as an imaginative and challenging composer for brass bands and symphonic wind ensembles that he has established his major reputation. A Yorkshireman, born in 1949, Wilby is able to keep close to the heart of brass band activity as a Yorkshire resident -- he is Professor of Composition at Leeds University -- and many of his pieces were written for and featured in British National Championships. This first CD devoted entirely to his music for brass presents a series of contrasting pieces which include two solo songs of a similar musical atmosphere -- one a setting of an Unholy Sonnet by the American poet Mark Jarman, and another a movement from A Brontë Mass first performed in 2007 -- a highly atmospheric setting of words by Branwell Brontë.

Wilby exerts impressive control over the nervous energy of A Breathless Alleluia, a tribute to the legendary music director of the Black Dyke Mills band

and many demonstrations of his technical wizardry with the band throughout the Paganini Variations, the earliest work on the disc, written in 1991 to a BBC commission.

Cyrano is a concertante work built around Rostard's famous drama, with the tuba as its central character, and Amazing Grace, a set of dramatic variations with Philip Gault as the baritone soloist and the composer as organist.

Wilby's Euphonium Concerto, completed in 1995, is both exciting -- as in the lively Greek dance movement 'Zeibekikos'

and beautifully lyrical in its slower second part.

Nothing stands still for long in this concert of Wilby's best of brass, and there is far more colour than an invitation to a brass band evening may, for some, suggest!

PHILIP WILBY

UNITED KINGDOM