Quintet for Brass - Andres Luz (Review)

 Quintet for Brass - Andres Luz


    Recently, in class, we listened to a Brass Quintet by Andres Luz, a postmodern Filipino-American composer. He had asked our class for feedback on the work, specifically the third movement. In this blog post, I aim to highlight the strengths of this composition along with how I believe it can be improved. 

Movement I- Grinding, Twisting Steel




Movement II- Intermezzo: Unexpected Amalgam



Movement III - ring modulation





Movement IV - Canzon á 5




Strengths

A lot of this piece is wonderfully composed, each movement sucsessfully achieves what it has set out to do. The video with the first movement shows the program notes and each movement envokes the characterstics Dr. Luz strives for the audience to feel. 

Each instrument is written idiomatically and plays to the strengths of the instrument.

There is good variation from movement to movement, almost to a detriment. 

It is incredibly fun to play. I played along with the recording and the score and I enjoyed it as a performer.

Weaknessess

The instrementation is very dense, no performer gets more than a few measures of rest at any given time, because of this after a few minutes of listening the impac of having everyone play at once is lost. It also starts to sound dynamically grey, playing around with density of scoring may be benificial. 

As mentioned earlier, I feel as if there is not enough conective material that is immediatly recognizable to the listener that ties each movment together. If I were to sit down and analyze the score, I am sure that I could find the connective tissue, but on first listen, it feels like muiscal whiplash.


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