Early in the field, the Coldstream Guards have a long history of contribution to record catalogues. In recent years, however, their recorded repertory has tended to concentrate on the bread-and-butter end of things; and it is good to see the players' skills now being exercised on the sterner stuff.
Not that Holst and Vaughan Williams are in their band music all that stern; but they do tend to take up rehearsal time, in military life a commodity usually in short supply. (Next time you hear a band in the park giving one of the week's 14 concerts, all of different programmes, and without intervening rehearsal, consider what preliminary work is necessary before such a thing can safely happen!)
The recording studio is different, or was on this occasion: exacting rehearsal has obviously gone into the production of these performances, skilled in the extreme. Curiously, the only isolated fluffs remaining all occur in the same place: rather many ragged beginnings have survived. More importantly, a high standard of solo playing catches the ear, and so, particularly, does an unusually good balance within the band. Where so often concert bands play with a brass-heavy balance more suitable to marching bands (which after all is historically the band's prime function in service life), here no such thing: instead of being continuously and wearisomely dominating, the punch of the brass is allowed instead to back the woodwind playing, or on suitable occasion to alternate with it in strength, exactly as the best of concert-band scores (which include all the music on the record) demand. Further, the rewarding overall blend is substantially helped along here by the strong resonance given to the band by a standard of recording which is also first class in every other respect. And this most agreeable sound is given splendid impulse almost everywhere (the 'almost' covers an unexpectedly flabby Toccata marziale) by the conductor, Lt.-Col. Ridings.
It is not only, however, the well-known scores which are valuable here; perhaps even more so, because the music is much less familiar today, is the choice of four scores by Walton O'Donnell. Walton was the eldest of three O'Donnell brothers who devoted their lives to military music. His final band appointment, in 1927, was directing the newly-formed BBC Wireless Military Band, with which he was able to set new standards of serious band music. This was partly by the use of civilian musicians of great skill (and no regimental duties!), partly by the use of specialist arrangers who could write especially for indoor performance (thus allowing for the occasional unaccompanied cor anglais solo, or harp ripple), and partly by the existence of a captive audience who could not vote for A Southern Wedding instead, even if they had wished to. The band was a marvellous organization which survived into the war (by when P. S. G., the middle O'Donnell brother, had taken over), but did not, unhappily, survive into the peace.
This is the background; the foreground is the inclusion here of four marvellous scores (for indoor band) by O'Donnell himself. Demanding very high standards of rehearsal, and performance (as well as indoor conditions and balance) they have become collectors' pieces rather than great popular favourites. If anything can put that right, this record will. The Coldstream Guards rise to the occasion; and O'Donnell's original splendid scoring, shown at its best in the very resonant recording, springs to life in the most rewarding of ways. The music itself is self-evidently listenable, and also of intrinsically good quality in an idiom towards the classical end of what used to be called 'light classical'. If you like Balfour Gardiner's Shepherd Fennel's Dance, say, you will like all of these O'Donnell pieces. but it is as sheer sound that they are eye openers. the bandsmen will without doubt have greatly enjoyed reviving them; I hope that many listeners will greatly enjoy meeting them for, quite likely, the first time.'