Andrew Rindfleisch, In the Zone

When a composer has an definite affinity to the brass ensemble and has absorbed the repertoire from the periods and locales when it had the most influence on the music in the air at the time, one can expect good things. That is so if the composer is Andrew Rindfleisch, at any rate, as heard on the recent disk by the Meridian Arts Ensemble, In the Zone (Innova 850).

What we have are four works for either full quintet ensemble, two trumpets, or trumpet and trombone, and rearrangements of an old hymn and four 19th century popular songs for quintet or quartet.

The composer has a pronounced knack for combining the brass ensemble sounds of yesterday and the day before with the modernist touch and a personal compositional stamp. The music is very brass-idiomatic yet occupies a rewarding space almost outside of time, or as if we were on a brass-seeking time machine that is reentering the present through the past.

It all works very well, in part because the Meridian Arts Ensemble plays the music with obvious relish, care, even devotion. They love this music and bring it to us in a most sympathetic light. But then why shouldn't they? It is so brass-proud!

And so we pleasurably traipse through Rindfleisch's "In the Zone" (2009), "Four Fanfares for Two Trumpets" (2011), "Fanfare" (1988) for quintet, "A Little Fanfare Music (By Lady Macbeth)", "Four Vintage Songs" (2011), and Henry Monk's 1861 "Abide with Me". And we get it, the humor, high spirits and love of brass congregations.

This one is pure fun but with the promise of purely weighty content! Recommended.