The Lancier Brass Quintet

The Lancier Brass Quintet is made up of five young professional musicians, who have been working as a group since the quintet’s formation in 2000. The quintet is made up of players who have worked at the top of their profession with renowned orchestras such as the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, as well as representing the European Union Youth Orchestra, the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, and the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. The quintet has a vast repertoire list, which combines classical arrangements and jazz standards with the original repertoire written for this combination of instruments. This versatility helped them gain a place in the final of the prestigious Royal Over-Seas League Competition in 2003, and also led to them being signed up by the Chris Sheldrick Management Agency later the same year. Other recent highlights include a live BBC Radio 3 broadcast and UK Premiere of Zhou Long’s Five Maskers, a performance which prompted the composer to acclaim the quintet as "a fantastic group of players".

David Hilton - Trumpet

David grew up in Worcestershire, where he started to learn the trumpet with local teacher, Duncan Conner. He continued his studies at the Junior Guildhall School of Music and Drama under John Miller, and subsequently gained a place in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. He also gained the positions of Principal Trumpet with the National Youth Chamber Orchestra and European Union Youth Orchestra.

David graduated from the Guildhall School of Music in 2001 with a First Class degree after studying with Paul Cosh and Paul Beniston, and now enjoys a busy freelance career in and around London. He plays regularly with many orchestras, including the BBC Orchestra’s, London Symphony Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, English National Opera, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, and has just returned from a two-week tour of Germany with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. He is currently also on trial for the Principal Trumpet position with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

Heidi Sutcliffe - Trumpet

Heidi was born in 1982 in Harwich, Essex. She completed her undergraduate studies at the Royal Academy of Music in 2004, gaining First Class Honours. Whilst there she received tuition from John Wallace and James Watson, among others, and gave her the opportunity to represent Great Britain in the Kyoto International Music Student’s Festival. Having represented the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain for four years, she went on to play with the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester and the European Union Youth Orchestra.

She is now on the Postgraduate course at the Royal College of Music, and receives lessons from Andy Crowley, Paul Archibald, and Paul Beniston. She has obtained funding from the Martin Musical Scholarship Fund, and also gained a scholarship from the Royal College to assist her financially.

Heidi also enjoys a busy freelance career, having worked with London Winds, the London Chamber Orchestra and the London Mozart Players. She has also enjoyed success further afield, when she was on trial for the Co-Principal position with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.

Rebecca Hill - French Horn

Born in 1981, Rebecca started playing the French horn at the age of 9. She subsequently studied at the Junior Guildhall, where for the majority of her time she learnt with David Bentley. In 1995 she became a member of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain of which she became Principal horn in her final year and was awarded the John Fletcher Memorial Prize for outstanding brass playing and contribution to the orchestra. During this time Rebecca was also awarded the Junior Guildhall Lutine Prize and she was the 1999 Shell/LSO Silver Medalist, culminating in a performance of Mozart’s 2^nd Horn Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra in the Barbican Hall.

In 2004, she graduated from the Guildhall School of Music, where she had studied with Jeffrey Bryant and Richard Bissill. Whilst at the Guildhall Rebecca joined the European Union Youth Orchestra and won the Guildhall Brass prize sponsored by the honorary company of Armourers and Braziers. Rebecca now enjoys a busy freelance career which has included trials with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Birmingham Royal Ballet, and led her to play with, among others, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

Matthew Gee - Trombone

Having started playing the trombone at the age of 7 with his local brass band, Matthew quickly became interested in orchestral music. He successfully auditioned for the National Children's Orchestra of Great Britain while being tutored by Chris Jeans, then of the John Foster and Sons Black Dyke Mills Band, and progressed to the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain.  Three years of working with the Orchestra resulted in promotion to section principal, which he then held for a further two years.

Over this period Matthew commuted from Leicester to London every Saturday to attend the Junior Guildhall School of Music and Drama.  While studying for a degree in music at King's College, London, he reached the brass final of the BBC Young Musician of the Year 2002, achieved positions in the European Union Youth Orchestra, the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester and the Janacek Youth Philharmonic, while also playing solo and chamber recitals in and around Leicester and London. After graduating from Kings with a 2:1, Matthew has continued his studies at the Royal College of Music in London, and worked with orchestras such as the London Symphony Orchestra and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

Since the age of 16 Matthew has studied with Ian Bousfield (principal of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra), Dudley Bright (principal of the London Symphony Orchestra), Dennis Wick (ex-principal of the London Symphony Orchestra), and is currently under the tutorage of Lindsey Shilling (principal of the London Philharmonic Orchestra).

Studying at the Royal College of Music has been made possible through the kind assistance of The Musicians Benevolent Fund, the Martin Musical Scholarship Fund, and The Countess of Munster Musical Trust.

Michael Levis - Tuba

Michael was born in 1982, and took up the piano at the age of seven. By the age of ten he had progressed to the tuba, and within six months had gained a place in the National Children's Orchestra, with whom he stayed for three years. Having been taught locally for four years, he then gained a place at the Junior Guildhall School of Music, to study under Graham Sibley, and was subsequently selected for a place in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain.

He graduated in 2004 from the Guildhall School of Music, where he studied under Patrick Harrild. During his time at the Guildhall he gained places in the London Philharmonic Youth Orchestra and the National Musicians Symphony Orchestra, and was twice finalist in the Guildhall Brass Prize. He was also given a concerto by the college for outstanding performance.

Michael enjoys a busy freelance career, which includes a trial for Principal Tuba with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and is touring Europe with the London Symphony Orchestra later in the year.

Jim Parker, who has won the British Academy Award for best original Television Music four times, has written scores for over one hundred television programmes and is one of Britain's most successful and versatile composers. His work on Film and Television ranges from the seventeenth century Moll Flanders, the eighteenth century Tom Jones, and the 1920's House of Eliott, to the witty and satirical contemporary score for the prestigious political thriller House of Cards.

After graduating as a silver medalist at the Guildhall School of Music, Parker played with leading London orchestras and chamber groups before concentrating on composing and conducting. He had early success with a series of recordings in which he set to music the poems of the late British Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman; the recordings, spoken by the poet and conducted by the composer have achieved classic status. These and subsequent records, including Captain Beaky which topped the charts as both a single and album, led to work in television as well as in the London West End theatre where he has had productions of three musicals. Film scores include numerous feature-length television films along with scores for the new prints of the classic silents Girl Shy, by Harold Lloyd and The Blot, a 1921 film directed by Lois Weber.

Concert works have been written for the Nash Ensemble, Philip Jones Brass, The Hilliard Ensemble, The Albion Ensemble, The Wallace Collection and Poems in the Underground. His published compositions include A Londoner in New York for brass, Mississippi Five for wind quintet, The Golden Section for brass quintet and a Clarinet concerto. The Bullfight is the opening movement of The Golden Section, and is based on the painting by Francisco de Goya bearing the same name. The Golden Section was written for The Wallace Collection in 1993.

Victor Ewald (1860-1935) was born in St Petersburg, and initially trained as a civil engineer. Musicians at the time had a habit of pursuing other careers at some point, with Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Mussourgsky, all friends of Ewald, being fully qualified as a chemist, navy inspector, and civil servant respectively. As Ewald was a cellist, it may be a surprise that Ewald’s early compositions were for string quartet, but later a flirtation with the French horn sparked an interest in brass chamber music. This led to him writing four brass quintets, though there is some doubt as to whether these were original compositions, or whether they were originally string quartets that were transcribed. Despite only one of the quintets being published in his lifetime, they are now an essential part of the brass repertory.

Claude Debussy (1862-1918) was one of the father figures of twentieth-century music, often associated with the Impressionist movement. He was not only influential on subsequent French composers such as Ravel and Messiaen, but also on other major European figures, such as Stravinsky and Bartok.

La fille aux cheveux de lin – or The Girl with the Flaxen hair – is Prelude No.8 from Book 1 of Debussy’s piano music. The piece is based on a poem about a Scottish girl.

Anthony Plog – Four Sketches

Anthony Plog was born in 1947 in California. He received his musical degree from the University of California Los Angeles. His trumpet studies were first with his father Clifton Plog, and later with Irvine Bush, Thomas Stevens, and James Stamp. Ha has a successful career as a soloist and has many recordings to his name. His compositional activities are substantial, especially for brass instruments, to the extent that a CD was released dedicated to his works for brass ("Anthony Plog – Colors for Brass").

Four Sketches was written in 1989, commissioned by Mel Jernigan and the St Louis Brass Quintet.

Luciano Berio - Call

Berio’s Call was commissioned in 1985 by the St. Louis New Music Circle in celebration of its 25th anniversary, received it’s first performance later that year by the Nashville Brass Quintet.

Berio said he was approached last fall by Elizabeth Gentry Sayad, the organization's chairman, and asked to produce a ''short, festive'' piece for the event. Despite having a busy schedule, with large-scale works for the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Orchestre de Paris and the Chicago Symphony still on the drawing board. Berio, after some deliberation, decided that he would accept the commission.

He later said that ''Two things helped me decide that, yes, I should do this piece. In the first place, I've been interested in the techniques of brass instruments for some time now. The latest piece in my 'Sequenza' series, 'Sequenza X,' is for solo trumpet, and the premiere took place in Los Angeles just last November. So I saw this as an opportunity to continue exploring certain ideas I had.

''Secondly, the occasion seemed to be very worthwhile; something worth celebrating. They wanted festive music for a festive occasion. Festivity is an important aspect of our lives. At least it should be. So I decided that I could make a contribution to this.''

Berio said he composed his fanfare in four days in late July. He added, though, that he knew how the piece would ''work'' as soon as he agreed to write it.

''Always, you start with the architecture of the piece,'' he said. ''In this case, I wanted to deal with four 'privileged' musical intervals, and I wanted to move from a structure that was simple to one that was complex. I had ideas, too, for an evolution of temporal elements, something that would grow from simple periodic rhythm, like a metronome, to passages played as fast as possible, with a continuum of speeds in between. This was the plan, the 'global view' of the piece. It came to me instantly. When I sat down to write the piece in July it was just a matter of filling in the details.''

Some of the details contained in the piece are fragments of melody borrowed from W.C. Handy's famous St. Louis Blues.' Berio said the references are so subtle that they probably won't be noticed by listeners. ''It was just something to get me started,'' he said, ''just a bit of material with which I could begin working. It's actually a very timid reference - the song implies an idiomatic way of singing or playing, and the jazz style does not play a role at all in this piece.''

Born in 1925, Berio emerged from the World War II years as a dedicated young ''modernist.'' He studied in Milan, before an encounter with the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen at Darmstadt in 1954 convinced him to jump on the bandwagon of 12-tone serial music. Berio's approach to 12-tone writing was never as rigorous as Stockhausen's, however, and in many of his works from the late 1950s the ''rules'' of serialism are discarded in favor of lyrical gestures. From 1955 to 1961 Berio served as director of the new electronic music studio operated by Italy's national radio station. Even his electronic pieces from this period reflect his need to create music that was ultimately more expressive than intellectual.

Freed from the procedural restrictions of serialism, by the mid-1960s Berio had developed an eclectic musical language in which any materials could be used if they helped further communication between composer and listener. He produced a number of works (the 1960 ''Circles,'' the 1966 ''Sequenza V'' for solo trombone) that call for overt theatrical action to be incorporated into the musical performance.

Eugène Bozza - Sonatine

Eugène Bozza (1905-1991) was a brilliant student at the Paris Conservatoire, winning First Prizes for the violin (1924), conducting (1930), composition (1934), as well as the Grand Prix de Rome. He conducted the orchestra of the Opera-Comique until 1948; he then became Head of the Conservatoire in Valenciennes. His works include several operas, ballets, large-scale symphonic and choral works. But his worldwide reputation is derived mainly for his many chamber works, written for various instrumental formations with a preference for wind instruments. As Paul Griffiths points out in his article from the New Grove, Bozza's works reveal "...melodic fluency, elgance of structure and a consistently sensitive concern for instrumental capabilities".

The Sonatine was written in 1951 for a band of the Garde Republicaine. And received its first performance later the same year.

The violinist composer Ludwig Maurer was born in Potsdam in 1789 and died in 1878 in St. Petersburg. Despite being a virtuoso violinist, Maurer also expressed a great interest in brass instruments, and along with a fellow violinist Ramsøe, became a pioneer for brass music. Although the origins of these works of Maurer's are still shrouded in darkness, it is common knowledge that Ramsøe and Maurer wrote the first known pieces for brass ensemble. Ramsøe's quartets nos. 15, written between 1866-67 and 1879 and published between 1880 and 1885, were intended for a circle of Copenhagen musicians, while his 6th quartet, which has remained in manuscript, was composed for the famous Kaiser-Cornet-Quartett of Julius Kosleck (1825-1905) from Berlin. Furthermore, we suspect that Maurer's brass works  Twelve Little Pieces (which contains the three pieces that will be played tonight) and an hitherto unknown 13th piece with the title Morning Greeting originated either in the circle of Russian amateur musicians around Tsar Alexander II. Nicolayevitch Romanov (1818-1881, reigned from 1855), or else in the brass chamber music class established at the St. Petersburg Conservatory by its first professor of cornet, Wilhelm Wurm (1826-1904, professor from 1869). In any case these brief, witty, entertaining pieces were not published during Maurer's lifetime.

Morley Calvert – Suite from the Monteregian Hills

Morley Calvert (1928-1991) was a conductor, bandmaster and composer born in Brantford, Ontario. His music education included an LSRM certification in 1946, and A. Mus degree from McGill in 1950, and a B. Mus degree from McGill in 1956. In 1958, Calvert founded the Monteregian Music Camp (providing summer training for high school students) at Ayers Cliff, Montreal, a camp which ended in 1970. He founded and directed the McGill University Concert Band, as well as starting a high school band in Montreal at Westmount High school. In 1967-72, Calvert founded and directed the Lakeshore Concert Band in Montreal.

Morley Calvert's professional activities included the position of accompanist for Maureen Forrester. Calvert was invited to join the American Bandmasters Association (ABA), and taught the high school band program at Barrie Central Collegiate school. He was President of the Ontario Chapter of the Canadian Bandmasters Association, and from 1981-83, Executive Vice-President of the National Chapter of the Canadian Bandmasters Association. He was the artistic director of the Civic Concert Choir of Hamilton in 1987, and of the Weston Silver Band in 1988. At the time of his death, he was teaching music at Mohawk College in Hamilton, Ontario

Morley Calvert composed and arranged works for band (some of which were for the Salvation Army), for brass quintet and for choir. His Suite for the Monteregian Hills was based on French Canadian folk songs and was named for the mountain range stretching from Mount Royal, Quebec to the American border. It was written under commission from the Montreal Brass Quintet, and received it’s first performance in 1961.