The first one

Fireworks For Brass; Chicago Chamber Brass

The Brookings Chamber Music Society has sponsored a series of world class small ensemble and solo classical music performances for the community of Brookings, SD, for more than three decades. The organization originally served to provide a venue for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra when it didn’t mind touring around the upper Midwest in the mid-1970’s. The association with the SPCO only lasted a few years. But it gave the people of Brookings, and its surrounding area, a taste of the quality of live classical music that lay many miles beyond the prairie purview. And they liked it.

So, the organization regrouped and set out to provide the community with an annual four- or five-concert series. Over the years, I sat in the audience to hear Leon Bates, Natalie Hinderas, Quink, Donna Roll, The Tallis Scholars and Eugenia Zuckerman.

One snowy evening in 1988, the Chicago Chamber Brass came to town and wowed their audience with not only their technical proficiency and musicianship but also their versatility of styles: Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, 20^th Century and Dixieland. And, shallow person that I am, I dug the Dixieland selections more than all the others. So, when I passed through the lobby after the concert, I saw that they had CD’s for sale. Nothing new there, most of the talent that came through brought recordings. But this time, the performing group brought ONLY CD’s. This constituted a change of the times for me. Another era had passed. Apparently where the CCB performed, they no longer needed to set out audiocassette tapes and LP albums.

In an interesting mixture of reluctance and exhilaration, I doled out the nineteen dollars for the sake of hearing “That’s-A-Plenty” one more time. At the time, I couldn’t make sense out of it; I had no CD player. What was I doing? A college student doesn’t have the money to just go out and purchase a new stereo component. Indeed, the CD sat on my shelf for a long time before I had an opportunity to listen to it.

But this is where it started. The Chicago Chamber Brass made me face the new and scary. Some day I would have to make a purchase. And when I did, “That’s-A-Plenty” would sound awesome.

Credits: To the Brookings Chamber Music Society, for bring live classical music to a community who likes it but can’t go very far to hear it.