Lunchtime Concert - Ibex Brass

Presented by the Royal Academy of Music

Ibex Brass is an award-winning new ensemble, formed in late 2017 by ten undergraduate and postgraduate students at the Royal Academy of Music. The group’s main aim is to expand the music for brass dectet well beyond that which already exists, and its repertoire centres around new, bespoke arrangements of canonical piano- and orchestral- works. Ibex Brass prides itself on its ability to give these well-known classics a new brassy sheen, and to encourage listeners to experience familiar repertoire in a new way.

In 2019, Ibex Brass were appointed Chamber Music Fellows at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and also won the annual ‘Worshipful Company of Musicians Brass Ensemble Prize’. Individual members of the ensemble have worked with a number of prestigious orchestras, including the European Union Youth Orchestra, Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and London Symphony Orchestra, and the collective talent represented in the group helps make Ibex concerts particularly exhilarating musical affairs. In this programme, the group presents two brand new arrangements of lesser-known works from across the Atlantic: the Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas’s Alcancías, and the American Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite. Although highly different in style, both works are typified by an abundance of colour and energy; energy which is here re-imagined vis-à-vis the medium of the brass dectet.