RCO Brass and CSO Brass

Where on earth would you pay $125 or $85 for a ticket to a brass ensemble concert? Well, how about a one-off charity joint concert of the brass sections of both the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and Chicago Symphony Orchestra? According to Ben Coy in Chicago, the concert (which was last week) was "unbelievable". I don't doubt it.

By the way, has anyone heard any news about the RCO Brass CD that is supposed to be out this month?

One Night Only in Chicago: RCO & CSO Brass, Two World Premieres

The dazzling 14-member Brass Ensemble of Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (RCO) will perform in a one-of-a-kind concert on May 3rd in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, sharing the stage with brass players from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO).

Tickets to the event are not available to the general public, but only to special CSO donors and through the American Friends of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (AF-RCO).

A dessert reception with the artists in Symphony Center’s Grainger Ballroom will follow the concert, which begins at 7:30 pm. Tickets are $125 (priority seating; $75 tax-deductible) and $85 (orchestra seating, $35 tax-deductible). A $60 tax-deductible contribution will enable a local high school musician to attend the concert.

The program will include music for combinations of brass instruments as well as the entire ensemble playing together and with members of the CSO. Although the RCO program begins

with antiphonal music of Gabrieli, the repertoire focuses on the 20th century, drawing on works by such composers as Ravel, Prokofiev, George Delerue and the Dutch-born Jan Koetsier, as well as Ennio Morricone, represented by an arrangement of his score for Once upon a Time in the West.

The RCO Brass Ensemble also will present world premieres of two works commissioned for the U.S. tour: The Call by RCO timpanist Nick Woud, and Night and Dawn by New York-based Raphael Mostel. The Mostel piece was commissioned in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Netherlands from Nazi occupation and has been underwritten by The Netherland-America Foundation (NAF).

This is the second U.S. tour for the RCO Brass Ensemble. During its 2003 tour of the northeast, a critic raved: “If you can't hear the whole Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, a concert by its brass section is a next-best thing…brass players from the fabled Amsterdam orchestra took the stage…and gave a dazzling display of virtuosity, stylishness, musicianship and all the other good things of concert life. From early Italian antiphony to American jazz, from Dutch neoclassicism to English angst, these gentlemen reigned as masters of class.

The RCO Brass Ensemble tour is being organized by the not-for-profit AF-RCO, a group formed 10 years ago to help create an annual presence in America for this truly world-class orchestra. During non-tour years for the Orchestra, the AF-RCO has begun bringing over RCO ensembles, to showcase members of the orchestra as master musicians and teachers in both usual tour cities as well as cities and college towns that would not normally have the chance to share in the “RCO tradition” – such as, this year, Des Moines (Drake College, May 4th) and Grinnell, IA (Grinnell College, May 5th) and Evanston, IL (at Northwestern, on May 6th). Master classes will be offered in those cities, as well as in Chicago at the Tuition-Free Conservatory.