The North Texas Wind Symphony is a superb ensemble of long standing, in every way on the level of a medium-sized municipal orchestra rather than that of the usual collegiate vanity-label group. Here it has been superbly recorded in a diverse program of twentieth and twenty-first century music that very much resembles one of the annual concerts the group might give on its home campus at the University of North Texas. The brisk Stampede by Steven Bryant is very much a curtain-raiser. The Poema Alpestre of Swiss composer ...
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The North Texas Wind Symphony is a superb ensemble of long standing, in every way on the level of a medium-sized municipal orchestra rather than that of the usual collegiate vanity-label group. Here it has been superbly recorded in a diverse program of twentieth and twenty-first century music that very much resembles one of the annual concerts the group might give on its home campus at the University of North Texas. The brisk Stampede by Steven Bryant is very much a curtain-raiser. The Poema Alpestre of Swiss composer Franco Cesarini was written as a tribute to Richard Strauss and takes his Alpensinfonie specifically as a point of departure, nicely fusing the twin objectives of transferring Strauss' orchestral sound to winds and creating a harmonic vocabulary that alludes to Strauss without slavishly imitating him. Michael Gandolfi's Vientos y Tangos (Winds and Tangos) does something of the same with tango models, suggesting a range of tango types from traditional to ultramodern while still holding to...
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