La Spiritata might be translated as The Wild One, but if not exactly “wild” by today’s standards, Gabrieli’s offering is certainly a spirited opener for today’s concert of brass music. It dates from 1608, and is one of seventeen of the composer’s Canzoni per Sonare (roughly, Songs to be Played) published posthumously in 1615. As one critic has noted, these pieces are “the finest music for instrumental ensemble of their time, the result of a major composer focusing his best effort on instrumental ensemble music, perhaps for the first time in European history.”

Venice, in the time of the Gabrielis (Giovanni and his uncle, Andrea, 1533-1585), was one of the most lively cities in the world: wealthy, powerful, and cosmopolitan. It even had its own school of Italian composers, and the Gabrielis were at the forefront. When Giovanni succeeded his uncle as the master of music at the great cathedral of St. Mark’s, he expanded both instrumental and vocal musical thought of the time. As Harold C. Schonberg has noted in his extraordinary book “The Lives of the Great Composers” (now in its third edition), “Gabrieli was interested in a big, brilliant sound, and when one hears his music, the glory of the late Italian Renaissance comes alive. The man was an innovator, and his ‘sonate’ for instruments alone pointed the way to the future.”

In 1974, while he was chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra and had his own music program on the BBC, André Previn composed his Four Outings for Brass Quintet for the English group The Philip Jones Brass Ensemble. There seems to be no stated reason for using the term “outings” in the title (perhaps the open space a brass group needs to resound as they should?), but the deft scoring is a reflection of the many talents of the composer-conductor-pianist who wrote the work.

Philip Jones provided the following program note: “The two outer movements are light-hearted in character and mid-Atlantic in style. The two inner movements explore sonorities of rather darker hue. The first of these, marked blues tempo, with its Scottish rhythm, may perhaps echo visits to the Edinburgh International festival, while the second, with hints of Kurt Weill, reminds us of Previn’s early Berlin background.”

The work is dedicated to tuba player John Fletcher, and the tuba is featured prominently, particularly in the first movement.

André Previn is one of the most versatile musicians of our time: composer; pianist; conductor, and at home equally in the realms of concert, opera, film, and popular/jazz music. He has, at various times, been the music director of the Houston, London, and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestras, and the Royal and Los Angeles Philharmonics. In his teens, he arranged for, and conducted, the MGM orchestra in film scores, and the breadth of his compositions encompasses everything from the concert stage to popular idioms. He is as welcome playing with jazz combos as he is conducting Shostakovich symphonies or Mozart piano concertos from the keyboard. One of his accomplishments in recent years is the composition of an opera based on Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire.

George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess is often called “The Great American Opera,” and justly so. Completed in 1935, and originally dismissed by some as “just a folk opera” or “just another Broadway musical,” over the years the work has become recognized for what it is: a great opera, brilliantly composed and powerfully dramatic. Meanwhile, its arias – and they are arias – have become as popular as Gershwin’s “popular songs.” The arrangement for brass of the excerpts we hear today was made by Jack Gale, when he was a member of the Manhattan Brass Quintet.

(By the way, Lyric Opera of Chicago will present its first performances ever of Porgy and Bess in its 2008-2009 season.)

In a tragically short life of only thirty-eight years, George Gershwin gave American music an astonishing amount of inventive, well-crafted, memorable works for both the popular and concert worlds. There are almost 600 songs for Broadway musicals and films, extraordinary concert pieces such as Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris, the Piano Concerto in F, and ingenious piano pieces such as the Three Preludes. And, of course - Porgy and Bess.

Gershwin worked constantly to improve his skills, studying with noted composers whenever he could enlist their help. There is an oft-reported, probably apocryphal story which tells of Gershwin asking Igor Stravinsky how much he would charge to give Gershwin lessons in composition, Stravinsky asking Gershwin how much money he made in a year (quite a few thousands, of course), and hearing the reply, Stravinsky saying, “Why don’t you give me lessons?”

Nuria Schoenberg-Nono reported the following: “(Gershwin) was forever seeking lessons from anyone he felt might improve his technical skills – from Ravel, Stravinsky, the violinist Joseph Achron and many others. In Hollywood he became a friend and tennis partner of (Arnold) Schoenberg’s and duly asked the older composer to accept him as a pupil. Schoenberg refused. ‘I would only make you a bad Schoenberg,’ he said, ‘and you’re such a good Gershwin already.’”