Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 17, 1993 TAG: 9309180016
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By SETH WILLIAMSON SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
This year he decided to do something about it.
Tuesday night will see the inaugural concert of the New River Chamber Winds, an elite group of homegrown professional and amateur wind players. Drawn mainly from the Radford University and Virginia Tech academic communities, the group will perform at 8 p.m. at Radford University's Preston Hall.
Camphouse, who is director of bands at Radford and an award- winning composer in his own right, says the area has had almost no exposure to the kind of music he wants to program.
He doesn't mean the big symphonic band classics by the likes of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst or Morton Gould, which do occasionally get performed at Radford and Tech.
"I'm talking about another repertoire out there that's more intimate. It's on a smaller scale, it calls for one player on a part and frequently requires great virtuosity, and it's just generally too difficult for average university players to handle," said Camphouse.
Western Virginia concertgoers for some time have had a fair chance to hear much of the great string chamber music. Blacksburg's Audubon Quartet, for example, is embarking on a complete cycle of the Beethoven string quartets this season. And Roanoke's Kandinsky Trio regularly performs the standard piano trio literature.
But it's a different story for wind chamber music, which has had a far lower profile in the area.
"I say why not expose the region to some of the finest, most intimate wind chamber literature? It's what I can't do at Radford University, it's the kind that Virginia Tech can't do solely with the student body. It's too hard."
To do the job, Camphouse recruited 24 of the area's finest players, many of whom are on the music faculties at Radford and Tech and who perform with the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra. They are augmented by four percussionists.
Star players include flutist David Jacobsen, oboist Margo Easter, clarinetist David Widder, hornist Wally Easter, trumpeter Allen Bachelder, trombonist Dayl Burnett, tubist Raymond Linkous and percussionist Al Wojtera.
"Every single player on the list is from the New River Valley," emphasized Camphouse. "This is not rent-a-band."
Trombonist Burnett, who is a Virginia Tech music professor, is enthusiastic about the new ensemble. "This is the kind of thing that you ought to do if you have the players," said Burnett. "Maybe this performance will open the door to other ones."
String players, long confident of their status as musical aristocrats, have been known to exhibit a sniffy demeanor toward the wind chamber literature. Mark Camphouse is impatient with that attitude.
"There's nothing inferior about this music, about the Stravinsky `Octet,' about Gounod's `Petite Symphonie.' We don't have to make any apologies for this type of literature. There are some hidden gems for this medium," he said.
The most unfamiliar piece on the inaugural program, and possibly the most difficult, is "A Requiem in Our Time" by the Finnish composer Eino Rautavaara.
Camphouse describes it as a dark work that reveals a pessimistic streak in the composer's temperment. The titles of the four movements are drawn from the Catholic Mass for the dead, though Rautavaara renamed the traditional "Credo" section "Credo et dubito," which means "I believe and I doubt."
Dayl Burnett, who will switch to the euphonium for this piece, said, "My favorite movements are the Credo and the last movement, where the euphonium has a solo, which is gonna be fun."
The euphonium, which Burnett describes as "a small tuba," will alter the tonal mix of the brass section.
"It has a mellower sound than the trombone, and it takes a bit of concentration, because if you've been playing trombone, the euphonium has a whole bunch of intonation problems that you have to get over."
The program will open with Camphouse's own "Ceremonial Fanfare," which was commissioned eight years ago by the United States Army Band. Since then the piece has been performed by members of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Richmond Symphony Orchestra, and the Northwestern University Symphonic Wind Ensemble.
Burnett says that, from a player's point of view, Camphouse's fanfare is a treat. "It's one of the best fanfares I've played. It's obvious that he was thinking of brass players when he wrote it, because the phrasing is such that you can actually get a breath."
Charles Gounod's "Petite symphonie pour instruments de vent" is exactly a century older than Camphouse's fanfare. A more accessible work than the Rautavaara, its genial melodies and rich texture show the influence of Gounod's years as a choral conductor and composer.
The final work on the program is one of the century's classics for small wind ensemble, the "Octet for Wind Instruments" of Igor Stravinsky. Dating from 1922, the piece is composed in the the cool neo-classical idiom of the era and was one of Stravinsky's many essays in "pure music."
It's also notable in being one of the few pieces from a great composer that had its origin in a dream.
Stravinsky reported that he dreamed he was in a small room in which players were performing music that he liked a lot. And although he could later remember none of the music, he did recall the instrumentation, which he reproduced in his "Octet."
Tuesday night's premiere concert for the New River Chamber Winds is the only one scheduled thus far for the new ensemble. Camphouse says he hopes to stage repeat performances of future programs at Virginia Tech and other venues throughout the region.
NEW RIVER CHAMBER WINDS: Tuesday, 8 p.m., Preston Auditorium, Radford University. $3 adults; $1 children. 831-5103, 831-5177.
by CNB