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Sousa: Music for Wind Band, Volume 20. Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama Wind Orchestra conducted by Keith Brion. Naxos. $11.99.

Sousa: Music for Wind Band, Volume 21. Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Wind Orchestra conducted by Keith Brion. Naxos. $11.99.

     Nearly two-and-a-quarter hours of rousing John Philip Sousa music, and nary a standalone march to be heard – this would be a major shock to listeners had not Keith Brion’s Naxos recordings been demonstrating, for almost 20 years at this point, just how varied Sousa’s music really is, well beyond the hyper-familiar marches. And in the process of showcasing Sousa’s versatility, Brion has been showing something else: that although Sousa’s music is in many ways quintessentially American – at least in the sense of the America of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries – it has now truly become of the entire world. Brion has proven this by having Sousa’s music played excellently and with relish by bands from all over the place, with Royal Welsh and Royal Birmingham examples in the two latest Music for Wind Band releases and with previous bands having come from Britain’s Royal Air Force, the Royal Netherlands Navy, Sweden’s Royal Navy, Norway’s Royal Navy and elsewhere.

     Interestingly, all these bands trace their lineage, to some degree, to Sousa himself: he created the form of band that remains the dominant type after more than a century and a quarter. It is a band with a highly distinctive sound, allied to but not entirely beholden to military traditions, capable of performing music of symphonic complexity – some of which Sousa himself wrote. And that type of music is much of what is on display in the latest releases in the Sousa series. Most directly in Volume 20, A Bouquet of Beloved Inspirations (1921) incorporates band versions of music by Bizet, Mendelssohn, Weber and Rossini – it turns out that the William Tell Overture was as ubiquitous and popular in the 1920s as it was later in the century and remains today. There is also a very clever homage to Haydn here: Good-Bye (1892), which takes a page – actually a number of pages – from Haydn’s Symphony No. 45, “Farewell,” by having band members walk off the stage as the music progresses; unlike Haydn, though, Sousa has them come back at the end of the work.

     Sousa was fond of the pastiche form, and often used it for collections of popular tunes as well as classical ones. An example here is Oh, How I’ve Waited for You (1926), a medley of popular songs with “wait” or “waiting” in their titles. Sousa was also fond of arranging tunes and songs from his 15 operettas for his band. Here Brion offers The Patient Egg from Act II of Chris and the Wonderful Lamp (1899), Girls Who Have Loved from Act II of The Free Lance (1905), and The Snow Baby from Act II of The Bride Elect (1897). Furthermore, Sousa was adept at jazzing up – sometimes literally – popular and show tunes, as in Follow the Swallow (1926), a distinctly jazzy version of a tune from a Broadway show. Also on this CD, rather oddly, is First Fantasia for Wind Band from “El Capitan” (1895), which is a touch strange on two levels. First, it is only half of the fantasia – the second half was included on the previous Sousa-series release in one of the less-comprehensible bits of programming in the sequence. Second, this is a Sousa work only to some extent. Sousa did create an arrangement of music from El Capitan, but this one was made by Vincent Ragone (1859-1929) – apparently Sousa included both this version and his own in his concerts. The arrangement has been further modified by David Stern, who edited it for modern bands – which, despite tracing their lineage to Sousa, differ in some ways. All these matters are mere quibbles, though: Sousa’s music shines through them all, retaining its freshness (to the point of naïveté) and the forthright pleasures that Sousa always intended to offer.

     Volume 21 of Brion’s series includes only three works, all of them arrangements or reconstructions – and for that reason, this disc shows Sousa in a very different light from the short-and-sweet approach usually associated with him. The CD also shows how cleverly Sousa incorporated some of his famous marches, which audiences were as eager to hear in his time as they are today, into works of different types that were written for different purposes. The first piece here is a set of selections from the same Chris and the Wonderful Lamp (1899) that made a brief appearance in Volume 20 and has shown up periodically throughout Brion’s series: Sousa’s retelling of the Aladdin story was very popular in its day. Arranged by Mike Purton, this suite strings together a number of well-made tunes that are thoroughly operetta-ish in design and impact and that collectively show Sousa’s adept handling of material for the stage. Next on the CD is Sisterhood of the States (1915), an occasional piece that Sousa created for the opening of a major theater venue in New York City; here it is reconstructed by Manuel A. Arambola. As in several other works that Brion has presented, Sousa here gathered material from marginally related sources and assembled it into a coherent whole. This time, as the work’s title indicates, the music came from all U.S. states – 48 at the time. In the original presentation, the work was a ballet; Sousa later made this arrangement as a concert work, being careful to incorporate at least a bit of music from every state, to be as inclusive as possible. And for a conclusion, which predictably would need to relate to the nation as a whole rather than any one part of it, Sousa brought in his most famous march, The Stars and Stripes Forever – which, however, is not heard here, since it was an addendum during performances. However, another of the composer’s most-famous marches does make an appearance in the third and longest work in Volume 21, Showing Off Before Company (1919). This is a more-than-half-hour piece (reconstructed and arranged by Kevin R. Tam) with a strong visual component that, of course, cannot be seen on a CD; it is also testimony to Sousa’s cleverness at turning problems into opportunities. Sousa used it at matinee concerts as band members straggled back from lunch – the work is more or less the opposite of Good-Bye, with individual sections appearing from offstage and playing material written for them, after which another section would show up, and so on. There would be no sign of Sousa: the sections performed on their own. However, once the entire band had assembled, Sousa would stride from the wings to the podium and conduct Semper Fidelis – or rather the last part of the march, the full band having handled its opening. A marvelous theatrical touch that showcases Sousa’s sense of humor as well as his compositional abilities, Showing Off Before Company, like everything else on the two latest Sousa-series discs, is a window into a long-vanished time in American music and a chance to hear the “beyond the marches” excellence of Sousa as a composer.