Performers

Black Dyke Band, David Childs (euphonium), Jonathan Scott (piano), Nicholas Childs (conductor)


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Reviews

The seventh volume of this outstanding long term series (started in 1992) covers an arc of compositional output stretching from 1966 to 2022.  The 21-year-old third year undergraduate writing a Concertante for Piano and Band was a very different composer to the one commissioned for a signature fanfare for students some 56 years later, yet the tensile thread of Edward Gregson’s musical DNA has lost none of its unique strength of character with the passing of time.   (Click here to read the whole review)

Iwan Fox, 4barsrest (October 2022)  

… this admirable series of discs now spans three decades since the first volume was released in the early 1990s … Black Dyke has been responsible for building the series into what has become an invaluable recorded legacy of Edward Gregson’s work for the medium …

Written in 1966, the Concerto for Piano and Band is a work of appropriately youthful, spirited exuberance, played here in sparkling style by soloist Jonathan Scott …

… Variations on Laudate Dominum leads us into much more familiar territory, its majestic theme by Hubert Parry giving rein to creative invention that now finds the composer fully-fledged, in terms of his style, played by Black Dyke with bristling verve, energy and touching sensitivity in the slower sections …

David Childs is a scintillating soloist in the Euphonium Concerto, a work that is intrinsically linked to his gifts as a performer and whose immense technical challenges are dispatched in almost disarming fashion …

… with the disc timed to coincide with the British Open, it is The World Rejoicing that might well prove to be the most attractive draw to the listener here.  Arguably the composer’s most overtly virtuosic work for band so far, this is quintessential Gregson, written with huge inventive flair and played with abundant relish by Nicholas Childs and his team …. at the age of 77, Edward Gregson is not only a creative Gian in the small world of brass bands that he loves so dearly, but also on the worldwide musical stage.

Christopher Thomas, Brass Band World (October 2022)