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 familiar wind-band textures. And Joseph Schwantner's three-movement Percussion Concerto, arranged for winds by Andrew Boysen Jr., is a work that deserves to be known better and perhaps even benefits from the dry surface an arrangement for winds gives it. The sound of this recording, made in a UNT auditorium, is startlingly precise, and the youthful players can't be faulted. There are plenty of indifferent recordings by university wind ensembles, but this one delivers the goods for those enamored of the wind symphony's distinctive sound.