The Score | Top Brass

The National Brass Ensemble, consisting of players from ten professional orchestras across the U.S., presented a sonically spectacular concert at Chicago’s Orchestra Hall on September 20. In performance for the first time together were brass musicians, mostly section principals, from the flagship orchestras of Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, as well as the Grant Park Orchestra, San Francisco Opera and Ballet, and Northwestern University (horn professor Gail Williams, a former member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and one of two women in the NBE; the other was Philadelphia Orchestra Principal Horn Jennifer Montone). In addition to John Williams’s Music for Brass, repertoire included arrangements by Timothy Higgins, principal trombone in the San Francisco Symphony and a member of the ensemble, of Gabrieli’s Sacrae symphoniae and the overtures to Verdi’s La forza del destino and Nabucco. Seen here leading the Verdi is CSO Music Director Riccardo Muti. Gabrieli, a hybrid SACD featuring the ensemble in the Williams and Gabrieli works, was released last fall by Oberlin Music and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.