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BRASS QUINTET DELIGHTS AUDIENCE

Clarke Bustard, Times-Dispatch Staff Writer, May 2002

The theory that classical music should be no fun at all suffered a grievous blow in 1970, when trombonist Eugene Watts, tuba player Charles Daellenbach and some associates in Toronto, one of the world's best-disguised fun cities, organized the Canadian Brass. Neither the theory nor the music has been the same since.

The quintet, which also includes three younger fry - trumpeter Ryan Anthony (who looks a little like the actor Ray Liotta), trumpeter Joe Burgstaller (who doesn't, but that's OK, because he was raised in Virginia) and French horn player Jeff Nelson (who is tall and looks good in a cowboy hat) - returned to Richmond last night so that Daellenbach could complain that the group hasn't received enough e-mail from local residents since the group's last appearance here.

Oh, and to give a concert, the finale of this season's Times-Dispatch Many Worlds, One Community series. Beginning with an encore (a venerable Canadian Brass tradition) of "Just a Closer Walk With Thee," the five musicians displayed their fabled virtuosity and versatility in material ranging from Bach, Handel and Gabrieli to medleys of Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller tunes.

Each listener in an unusually diverse crowd of 850 got some delight up his or her musical alley: Anthony's piccolo-trumpet high notes and curlicues in baroque pieces and the Beatles' "Penny Lane," Watts' memorable trombone solo in "Saints' Hallelujah" (the group's delicious gumbo of Handel's "Hallelujah" Chorus and "When the Saints Go Marching In"), Burgstaller's uncanny impersonation of Charles "Cootie" Williams in Ellington's "Echoes of Harlem," to name just three highlights.

But a Canadian Brass concert, however richly musical, is about comic entertainment at least as much as it is about music. Witty introductions by Daellenbach and Watts are intrinsic to the show. So are anti-highbrow wardrobe accessories such as the white sneakers the musicians wear with their black suits. The accessorizing reached its apogee this time in the quintet's performance of "Hornsmoke: a One-Horse Opera in One Act," an epic retelling of the building, remodeling and deconstruction of the American West by Peter Schickele, the composer best known for his "rediscovery" of P.D.Q. Bach. "Hornsmoke," which may be the only opera to almost completely dispense with singing (that earned a round of applause before it began) and definitely the only one to feature a trumpet player in drag as one of its romantic leads, boils the legend of the Old West down to what really counts men doing what men gotta do - romancin' and killin' - and then moseyin' off into the sunset playin' mournfully on a gold-plated Yamaha trumpet. Schickele's opera was, needless to say, made for the Canadian Brass.

It left last night's audience completely, deliriously hornswoggled. A term that, we may hope, is applied to the Canadian Brass more often than "Eh?"

FOR REFERENCE ONLY. NOT TO BE REPUBLISHED.