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Site review by Geohominid June 18, 2011
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Performance: Sonics (S/MC): / |
This Voluntary Fire Brigade disc is unique. Invite a few musical friends around and seat them appropriately. Open the fireproof metal disc box (the same dimensions as an SA-CD jewel box) and set the player going. Watch the expression on their faces as Mozart's Marriage of Figaro turns in a few seconds into a shockingly loud finale to Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony. Your friends will struggle for a while as the ghastly mis-tuning of winds and brass gets worse and is swept by a storm of percussion; they won't want to offend you by telling you that the disc is dreadful.
Is this a joke? Well, of course. Here we have a Finnish contribution to the long and glorious tradition of musical satire. If you know the recordings of the famous Hoffnung Music Festivals from the 1950s and early 60s in London, the works of one P.D.Q. Bach and the Nutcracker Suite of Spike Jones and his City Slickers (1945), then you will know what you are in for if you purchase this new disc. As my very first experience of classical music records as a small child was hosted by the said Spike Jones, I well remember the peals of laughter it provoked from me. So I'm very happy indeed that the Finns have their own tradition of extracting fun from their pompous classical music establishment - and at the same time poking fun at local and state-wide politics.
Almost everything about this release is a joke in some way or other. The very box cover and the names thereon are bogus; the artwork a parody of EMI Classics labels, so the only bit of truth is the note about hybrid discs. There is no Voluntary Fire Brigade Band, but a tradition from the 1930s of students from the Helsinki University of Technology forming a wind orchestra, concocting these wickedly altered scores and performing them in concerts.
Nowadays from the re-named Aalto University, the student band also has a biennial engagement for concerts at Helsinki's famous Finlandia Hall with over 1200 fans in sell-out audiences (sic). Often there are high-profile musical guests at these concerts, which are broadly similar to the Hoffnung ones (these apparently still persist sporadically at the Festival Hall in London). The band's members are pretty good musicians at heart, indeed several of their soloists are exceptional. Its present conductor, for example, is a superb trumpeter: hear him taking out Haydn's Trumpet Concerto on Track 6.
I don't want to spoil the pleasure of discovering for the first time this utterly unique view of classical music by giving too many details. The scoring is brilliantly inventive, the fiendishly ingenious inter-cutting of musical chunks is hilarious (some might remember "Let's Make a Concerto" on the first Hoffnung disc) and one observes that even apparently healthy musical instruments can take on fatal diseases in the hands of the band, whose collective tongues are firmly pushed into their cheeks. There even appear to be instruments which probably should remain nameless. No composer is sacred, even poor old Sibelius gets dragged into a climax experienced by Klo D. Bussi's Clair le Nude. One can have lot of fun spotting the tantalisingly swift insertions of "foreign" musical quotations, a potent (and embarrassing) test of one's musical knowledge. And have you ever heard polytonal whistling before?
Somehow this disc keeps working its way back into my player. The clever comic material does not wear thin with repetition; I'm still laughing out loud and continually chuckling at the outrages perpetrated by this inspired group who are not voluntary firemen. They are the clowns of classical music, and I do hope someone puts them up for a Grammy.
How to award points? Well, the laughter says it all about the performances, and Mika Koivusalo's 5.0 recording, deliberately set in a less than lovely acoustic, images the sound stage with uncanny precision. This allows one to gain extra entertainment by being able to pinpoint musicians with excessively in-tune playing and fire a potato-gun towards the sonic miscreants. A word of warning, though - the alleged band often plays their instruments at their loudest possible level, particularly the bass drum, so there is potentially speaker-damaging energy from this disc. At the other end of the huge dynamic range, the softest touches on a glockenspiel are also faithfully recorded. So full marks for recording too. Don't worry that much of the booklet is only in Finnish - it is so filled with Finnish "in-jokes" and word-play that it is untranslatable anyway. There are summaries in English, German and French. The musical romps, however, speak eloquently (?) for themselves.
Recommended to anyone with a sense of humour, and essential listening for those lonely people with perfect pitch.
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Copyright © 2011 John Miller and SA-CD.net
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