Labour & Love (Percy Fletcher), RNCM Brass Band

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This video is taken from a concert given by the Royal Northern College of Music (Manchester, UK) Brass Band at Regent Hall, London on Friday 14th October 2016. The conductor is Alex Webb (currently studying for a Masters in Conducting at the RNCM).
Labour & Love (Percy Fletcher) - the following review of the work is taken from the 4barsrest.com website (www.4barsrest.c...
’Labour & Love’ is a seminal work in the history of the brass band movement - although more by historical happenstance than anything else. Percy Fletcher’s work became the first ‘original’ brass band composition to be used as a test piece, when it was performed at the 1913 National Championships at Crystal Palace.
Fletcher was a conductor and composer of light music, ballads, salon pieces and theatre music, who left little impression on the greater musical public on his death. He is though best known to the banding movement for ‘An Epic Symphony’, and for this curious work. The piece was originally called ‘A Comedy of Errors’ and was written in response to a call made by British Bandsman newspaper Editor Herbert Whiteley for ‘better’ music for brass bands.
Mindful of the title, the piece was initially rejected, but soon resurfaced under its new name of ‘Labour & Love’ - a crafty reinvention (imposed it is suspected by Iles and Whiteley and then aided by the composer) given the rising popularity of the trade union and wider ‘Labour’ movement (Robert Tressell’s seminal work of literature, ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’ was published in 1914). In it’s way that was a ‘first’ for the brass band movement too - although many others have since followed suit.
It is not however a celebration of romanticised working class values - more a piece of flimsy opportunism to ‘create’ a story to fit what is in essence, a rather dated, conservative construction of 19th century operatic tone poem writing. Fletcher was no novice to the brass band genre (he had been to Crystal Palace to hear bands play at the Nationals before), and the work has an easily defined lineage to the operatic selections that were the staple diet of the contest in the preceding years.
The fly leaf notes are romantic bluff: ‘The introduction typifies the state of mind of a man, who, having no love for his work, finds his surroundings oppressive and fancies himself merely in the position of a downtrodden salve,” Fletcher loquaciously writes. He adds: “The Allegro agitato represents him engaged in his daily task, blindly labouring on, using mere muscular force, having no purpose in view. The interlude Meno Mosso, leads into the Andante patetico where his soul cries out in a lament of anguish and despair that he will labour no longer under these conditions.. etc, etc…”
There is more of this is Barbara Taylor-Bradford stuff - and equally as nonsensical.
Even the final claim: “He realises he has a purpose in life, and his work is now to him a Labour of Love”, is rather meaningless given that particular titled inspiration comes from the Bible (Thessalonians 1:2, 1:3) rather than a copy of the 1913 Morning Star newspaper.
Still, it’s a tricky old piece, full of colourful writing and expressive lyricism and more than enough technical challenges to test bands of a higher standard than that in the Third section.
Plenty of bands will ‘labour’ their way through 97 year old work, but it will be questionable to how many will actually grow to ‘love’ it.