September 25, 2026
Bach’s Lunch: Antiphonal Brass Choirs
First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta
Atlanta, Georgia – USA
Kevin Lyons, trumpet; Yvonne Toll, trumpet; Ryan Moser, trumpet; Bill Mann, trombone; Mackenzie Newell, horn; Don Strand, tuba; Ryan Black, trombone; Jason Robinson, [unknown]; Adam Frey, euphonium; Paul Poovey, trumpet; Andrew Burhans, horn.
John CHEETHAM: Commemorative Fanfare (1939–2024)
Tielman SUSATO: Renaissance Dances
Giovanni GABRIELI: Canon in Echo Duodecimi Toni
Giovanni GABRIELI: Jubilate Deo
Giovanni GABRIELI: Sonata 8
Johann PACHELBEL: Magnificat
Steve WILLIAMS: Penny Day
Steven SHERRILL: Just for Fun
Richard WAGNER: Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral
Howard Wershil | 28 SEP 2026
The first Bach’s Lunch noontime concert of the Emory Chamber Music Society of Atlanta’s 2026–27 season brought a particularly apt kind of musical architecture to First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta on September 25: three brass choirs distributed throughout the sanctuary, answering one another across the room in music spanning the Renaissance to the present day. The program, Antiphonal Brass Choirs, was led by trumpeter Kevin Lyons and presented by Concerts @ First in collaboration with the Emory Chamber Music Society of Atlanta.
The relationship between First Presbyterian and ECMSA is not new. Bach’s Lunch is a recurring noontime series at First Presbyterian, with the church presenting the concerts in conjunction with the Emory Chamber Music Society, making the series one of the Society’s continuing outlets beyond the Emory campus.
For this opening program, the physical arrangement of the musicians was more than a staging convenience. It was fundamental to the mid-concert repertoire. Giovanni Gabrieli’s Venetian music, in particular, was written for the spatial separation of instrumental and vocal groups, and the sanctuary gave that idea an immediate architectural reality. The three brass choirs were positioned around the room, allowing musical phrases to travel across the intervening space rather than arriving from a single frontal source. The effect made the sanctuary itself part of the performance.
The program began with John Cheetham’s Commemorative Fanfare, a 1979 work commissioned for graduation exercises at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Although Cheetham wrote the piece for brass and timpani, this performance used brass alone. Broad and declamatory, with sonorous quartal harmonies associated with mid-century American concert music, it directly evoked the American tradition of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.
Tielman Susato’s Renaissance Dances, in John Iveson’s brass arrangement, moved the program backward into the Renaissance. The five dances, drawn from Susato’s Danserye, traded the weight of ceremonial brass writing for the buoyancy and rhythmic directness of Renaissance dance. The players gave the music an easy physicality, particularly in the three faster movements.
Three Gabrieli selections formed the program’s central argument. Canzon in echo duodecimi toni makes the answering principle explicit in both its title and construction, dividing the players into two groups whose musical lines answer across the space. Jubilate Deo and Sonata 8 extended Gabrieli’s Venetian sound world into different musical forms, giving the three works a broader sense of contrast within the antiphonal concept. Here, the distance between the ensembles mattered as much as their individual sound. Rather than simply producing a larger brass sonority, the arrangement allowed the listener to hear separate musical bodies responding across the sanctuary.
Arthur Frackenpohl’s arrangement of Johann Pachelbel’s Magnificat brought the same double-brass-choir format into another Baroque idiom. Its contrapuntal writing gave the two groups further opportunity to answer and reinforce one another. To aid coordination, euphoniumist Adam Frey put down his instrument and conducted the ensemble.
The ensemble came back together for two more contemporary works, beginning with Steve Williams’ Penny Day, which brought jazzy elements and harmonies into the brass texture. Steven Sherrill’s Just for Fun followed with its “Neo-Calypso” character, introducing a deliberately lighter rhythmic vocabulary to the brass-ensemble format.
Sherrill also supplied the arrangement for the closing work, Wagner’s Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral from Lohengrin. In this brass ensemble transcription, the piece brought forth a large, sustained Wagnerian sonority that gradually filled the room, closing the noon-time concert in a single, gathered resonance. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Emory Chamber Music Society of Atlanta: chambermusicsociety.emory.edu
- Concerts @ First: concertsatfirst.org
Read more by Mark Gresham.
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