Plainly intended as a showcase album, Bells for Stokowski may appeal more to band enthusiasts than to a wider audience. Jerry Junkin and the
University of Texas Wind Ensemble maintain a high degree of polish and professionalism, and the clean HDCD recording serves them well. Even so, their program is tame and less than compelling, despite the performers' exceptional abilities. Patrick Dunnigan's festive arrangement of Tylman Susato's Dansereye opens the disc, and this setting of Renaissance dances is pleasant enough, if too consistently heavy on brass and percussion.
Vaughan Williams' English Folk Song Suite is a compact medley of sea shanties and marches, the most familiar work on the program and easy to absorb. More problematic is David del Tredici's In Wartime, an odd blending of martial clichés and irrelevant musical quotations. Unambiguously tonal but ambivalent in its programmatic allusions, this rumination on the war in Iraq is the least attractive piece for its musical jingoism. Michael Daugherty's Bells for Stokowski -- originally the third movement from his orchestral Philadelphia Stories -- appears here in the version for band. This colorful tribute to the legendary conductor is the most technically challenging work on the program, yet its game-playing and showiness make it seem insincere and too clever by half.