Is there anything quite as cliche as putting a foggy Golden Gate Bridge on the cover of your album? Well, it’s not like brass is the most subtle orchestra section. (Besides, Toro y Moi made it cool again.)
Deified is a new album by the National Brass Ensemble under Korean conductor Eun Sun Kim, who also happens to be the first woman to serve as music director of the San Francisco Opera. The ensemble itself is made up of members from across the country, though most hail from the San Francisco Symphony. A nearly two-hour collection split into two parts, the album is named after “Deified” by Jonathan Bingham, who won the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and San Francisco Symphony’s Emerging Black Composers Project competition in 2021.
On the second disc, the ensemble performs Timothy Higgins’ arrangement of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, the four-part German language opera that takes about 15 hours to perform in its entirety. Epic is an understatement, and the shorter arrangement performed here by the ensemble retains that sweeping drama and grandiosity. Even non-classical music fans will recognize the “Ride of the Valkyries” (disc 2, track 8) and anyone who grew up on John Williams soundtracks will appreciate the profound musicality of these big brassy themes.
