The front cover of this CD doesn't identify it as a collection of marches for wind band, but that's what it is. It's also unlike almost any other collection of marches you've ever heard. The range of music, some of it arranged or adapted for the forces of Norway's Kristiansand Blaseensemble, is wide and unfailingly entertaining, with a collection of pieces that can only be described as unique individuals. There are a pair of patriotic marches from World War II, one Soviet, by Prokofiev, and one American, by Barber. It's ...
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The front cover of this CD doesn't identify it as a collection of marches for wind band, but that's what it is. It's also unlike almost any other collection of marches you've ever heard. The range of music, some of it arranged or adapted for the forces of Norway's Kristiansand Blaseensemble, is wide and unfailingly entertaining, with a collection of pieces that can only be described as unique individuals. There are a pair of patriotic marches from World War II, one Soviet, by Prokofiev, and one American, by Barber. It's fascinating to note that even a work written from the depths of the Soviet wartime experience retains something of Prokofiev's acid-tipped edge. Temporally the marches run from Mendelssohn and Weber to the middle of the twentieth century, and temperamentally they run from experimental to populist. What other band recording has included both the Ives Overture and March "1776" and the Grand March to the Memory of Washington by Ole Bull? Little of the music is familiar, all is intriguing,...
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