Setting a cheerful tone for the upcoming holiday season with some big brass ones — but not too big — is the hope of the minds and musicians involved in a pair of concerts this weekend at K̠unéix̠ Hídi Northern Light United Church.
The show “Christmas Wrapped in Brass” is scheduled to be performed by the Taku Winds brass ensemble at 7 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday. The concerts, expected to be 75 to 90 minutes long with an intermission, are free with donations accepted.
Juneau Community Bands kicked off the holiday season last year with a larger-scale ensemble-and-chorus performance of Handel’s “Messiah,” but board member David Grove said during a rehearsal on Wednesday he was seeking to set a different tone this year. He said he looked for interesting brass arrangements of traditional carols, which ruled out some compositions not really suited for the instruments involved, but the concept of a brass holiday concert resonated with him.
“Brass and Christmas go together,” he said. “Yes, we’re all prima donnas and we specialize in playing loud, but we try to play soft. Brass, it is a tradition at Christmas time. We’re going to do some woodwind concerts this spring, but it’s brass for now.”
Some of the songs in the program such as “Greensleeves” are universally known, while others such as the 17th-century French carol “Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella” somewhat less so.
“We have some music that is 1,000-year-old music and we have just 10-year-old music,” Grove said.
Grove said some of the oldest compositions are also getting newer, jazzier arrangements.
“I would be willing to bet you three dozen donuts against a dollar that you haven’t heard ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’ like we’re going to play it,” he said.
Among the newer compositions is “Christmas Toons,” which sounds exactly as whimsical as its name suggests, Grove said. A few extra elements will also be layered in during the concerts, including the church’s organ joining the ensemble for a reading of “The Night Before Christmas.”
Several of the songs feature arrangements by Seattle composer and musician Anthony DiLorenzo, whose website credits him with decades of works ranging from symphonies performed by orchestras worldwide to film scores to sports theme songs for television networks.
The challenge of conducting such a concert is making sure individual instruments remain distinct and the density of the ensemble’s sound doesn’t overwhelm the church, said Alan Young, a longtime Juneau musician and instructor who is conducting the concerts.
“It’s using the different tonalities of the instruments to mix that so everything can come forth,” he said. “And it’s a challenge, especially in a very resonant space like this, to not have everything get so heavy that it kind of gets muddled together. You keep things light and make sure that everybody is really actively listening to each other in the ensemble.”
The first rehearsals by the group were in the music room at Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé, so when they staged their first rehearsal at the church on Tuesday it turned out some fine-tuning was in order, Young said.
“It started real sloppy because people are like ‘Wow, this is so much different than the JDHS band room,’” he said. “And then by halfway through the song — these are trained musicians up here — they’re listening and they’re adjusting, and it’s like ‘OK, I’ve got the room now.”
Young said the focus during the final rehearsals is now on making the most of the space’s features, acoustically speaking.
“The nice thing about this is that you don’t have to overplay anything,” he said. “One thing with this that can especially happen with brass musicians is that you want to try to play loud because it’s cool and exciting. But if you overdo it the tone starts to spread and not sound very good. So one way that you can make use of an acoustically really live space is it allows you to to kind of take 5% or 10% off of it and still focus on the really warm, large sound, and the reverberation kind of takes care of the rest.”
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
Alan Young conducts the Taku Winds brass ensemble through a rehearsal Wednesday for its upcoming holiday concerts Saturday and Sunday at K̠unéix̠ Hídi Northern Light United Church. (Mark Sabbatini / Juneau Empire)
