Category: TEST PIECES (Major Works) Composer / arranger: Philip Wilby
Duration 12.00
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Previously set as a Championship Testpiece.
Leonardo da Vinci died in 1519, and at his death was the most celebrated artist of his age. Of course, this very artistic reputation was based on a mere handful of surviving works, and many of those are now in a very poor state of repair. However, his current celebrity draws much of its potency from his amazing polymathic interests in all branches of Renaissance knowledge. His researches as an anatomist, as a medical practitioner, or as a military engineer who invented bicycles, diving masks, and machine guns, demonstrate but a few of his non- artistic interests.
A large collection of his sketchbooks are kept in the Queen’s Library at Windsor Castle, and many of his preoccupations are more easily traced from these ephemera than from his more finished works. In particular, his studies of turbulence, of waves and currents, and the rational designs behind apparently chaotic disorder have a special resonance to our current age.
My own composition has taken a sequence of these sketches as a springboard. They translate his visual studies into purely musical terms, and transform their images, turbulentor intimate, mechanistic or heraldic by turns, into a composition which draws its energy from Leonardo’s great example.
Category: TEST PIECES (Major Works) Composer: Franz Liszt Arranger: Bram Gay
Symphonic Poem No.3 (1848) Les Preludes
Les Preludes, the third of Liszt’s thirteen symphonic poems, is alone among his thirteen to have retained a firm place in the repertoire.
The composer has offered the following preface:
Is not this life a series of preludes to that mysterious song of which death sounds the first solemn note? Love forms the beautiful dawn of every life; but where is the early life in which dreams of bliss are not interrupted by some storm which mars their lovely illusion and with lightning flash shatters their foundation? Where is the wounded soul who would not seek forgefidness in contemplation of the beauties of nature? But man does not languish long in sweet idleness. When the trumpet sounds the alarm he hurries to the place of danger and endeavours to recover his frill self-consciousmess and possession of his powers.
This transcription, which is dedicated to Fodens Band on its hundreth birthday, was made at the request of Elgar Howarth who gave the first performance with the Grimethorpe Colliery Band at The University of York in February 2000. The present score accords with the errata issued at the time of the British Open Championship of 2001 and some further corrections have been made.
Category: TEST PIECES (Major Works) Composer / arranger: Cyril Jenkins
Previously set as Championship and First section testpieces. duration - 14.33
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