Chicago Gargoyle Brass and Organ Ensemble - Nights Bright Days - Britten: Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia; Holst, Meechan and Purcell (2019)

The Chicago Gargoyle Brass was founded in 1992 by its Artistic Director, H. Rodney Holmes, as a chamber group of faculty and students at the University of Chicago, whose campus architecture boasts a charming variety of the ensemble’s namesake. By 2006, the ensemble had slowly professionalized and established a residency in the western suburbs at a major church with a full-time professional organist. Over the next five years, the group transformed itself into a specialized brass and organ concert ensemble, comprised of classically trained musicians, performing a wide variety of repertoire in an equally diverse range of settings. Well into its third decade, the Chicago Gargoyle Brass and Organ Ensemble maintains its position at the cutting edge of music for brass and organ, commissioning and performing new arrangements and compositions for that instrumental pairing.

Craig Garner has been arranging music for more than 30 years, and has performed with the Boston Pops, Boston Opera Company Orchestra and other Boston area orchestras. As an arranger, Garner has for the last 20 years concentrated on music for brass instruments, having has published more than 120 works. During that time, he co-founded Dorm 40 Music, a publishing company specializing in music for brass. Garner focuses on arranging long-form symphonic works, not typically found in the brass ensemble repertoire. Garner attended the Boston Conservatory and the New England Conservatory, where he received a Master of Music degree.

The works of Winnipeg-based British composer Peter Meechan (born 1980 in the Midlands town of Nuneaton) have been performed internationally, while his music is included in more than one hundred commercial recordings. Meechan’s appointment as the first “Young Composer in Association” with the famous Black Dyke Mills Brass Band reflects his preoccupation with music for bands of different kinds. He progressed to Composer in Residence with Black Dyke Mills (2006-7) and held the same title with the Band of the Coldstream Guards from 2012-15. He has also held the position of Musical Associate with the equally distinguished Fodens Band. Among the various prestigious orchestras, wind orchestras and brass bands which have performed or recorded his works are “The President’s Own” US Marine Band, the USAF Band, the US Army Band, the Black Dyke Mills Band and the Coldstream Guards Band, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Concert Orchestra, the Royal Northern College of Music Wind Orchestra and the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. Meechan’s more recent works include a symphony for wind orchestra, another large-scale wind-orchestra piece entitled Athabasca (after the glacier), a trumpet concerto and a tuba sonata.

The Oriana Singers, an international-prize-winning vocal ensemble, was founded by its Artistic Director, William Chin, in 1979 as part of the vanguard of small choral ensembles performing a wide repertoire that includes historically informed performances of Early Music. City Voices, one of Chicago’s most versatile community choruses, was founded in 2009, also by William Chin, under whose direction the two ensembles have performed large scale choral works throughout the region.