Despite being one of Britain’s leading composers over the past few decades, John McCabe (b. 1939) has not been well served by the record industry. True, he has made – and still makes – recordings as a pianist, but almost never of his own music, while his orchestral works have only rarely appeared on disc, and then fleetingly. Even a classic score (and that is no exaggeration) like Cloudcatcher Fells (1984), here receiving its third recording (its second on Doyen) has not hitherto made it into the pages of this august journal. Yet when audiences get the chance to hear his music, either in the concert-hall or on record, they lap it up.
Full marks go to Doyen for the present collection of all five (to date) of McCabe’s brass band compositions. The programming is not chronological, but starts and ends with the two most recent, from 1992: Salamander and the rather Waltonian Northern Lights (no Saariahovian filigree here). In between come Cloudcatcher, Desert II: Horizon (1985) and Images. This last, written as long ago as 1967, caused a considerable furore in the then sedate brass-band world (before Henze, Birtwistle or Simpson contributed their ground-breaking works) with its use of serial techniques, though the music is still tonally based. The Britannia Building Society Band under Howard Snell have the measure of these works. Only in Cloudcatcher can any comparisons be drawn: Snell has the edge, I feel, over Evans and Leyland DAF on Doyen; against the mighty Black Dyke Mills on Chandos, honours are even in two quite distinct interpretations.
Mention of Robert Simpson provides perhaps the most potent comparison for this disc, in Hyperion’s magnificent survey of his brass band output (9/91). There are some interesting parallels between McCabe’s and Simpson’s brass band careers; both wrote an isolated work to start with (Simpson’s Energy dates from 1971), before striking gold with their second one (Simpson’s Volcano was written in 1978), which led to three further pieces. Simpson has perhaps the edge in contrapuntal rigour, McCabe a wider textural palette. The two discs are perhaps the finest advertisement for serious British composition for brass, and deserve the widest exposure. Very, very strongly recommended.'