BRUCE BROUGHTON (b.1945): Tuba Concerto, JAMES GRANT (b.1954): 3 Furies for Tuba and Orchestra, STEVEN WINTEREGG (b.1952): Concerto for Tuba and Small Orchestra, BARBARA YORK (b.195?): Tuba Concerto.

Catalogue Number: 09L097
Label: Albany
Reference: TROY 1133
Format: CD
Price: $17.98
Description: roughton is an acclaimed film music composer, the craft of mellifluous and attractive arrangement apparently second nature, and his work is correspondingly attractive and divertingly put together, framing a songful slow movement with lively outer movements. Grant's Furies are similarly tonal and engaging, though here the emphasis is on virtuosic tuba technique. The piece was originally intended as a technical study for the instrument, and subsequently dressed up in a light, lively orchestral guise (the second movement delightfully Gershwinesque), with ample humor alongside the formidable demands of the solo part. Winteregg is himself a tuba player, and explores the instrument's expressive capabilities fully in three movements entitled Heroic, Lyrical, and Dramatic, making it clear that the tuba is to be taken seriously as a solo protagonist; the work is thus a bit more serious of content (though not somber or in any way forbidding) than the other three works here, with which it shares a tonal language. York's concerto is neo-romantic in vocabulary (with many overt and intentional references to Prokofiev), and programmatic in content, with an extramusical subtext 'about' a young soldier's experience of war, from patriotic incentives through remembrance of peace to the fury of battle (interrupted by an effective nostalgic blues). Timothy Buzbee (tuba), Iceland Symphony Orchestra; Jacomo Rafael Bairos.