Repasz Band features Muncy native as Tuba Soloist
MUNCY – Meet Adam Peck. He will be tuba-soloist with the Repasz Band at their upcoming Spring Concert to be held April 19 at the Community Arts Center. He will perform Richard Strauss’s “Concerto Number 1 for Horn” transcribed for the tuba. This concerto takes speedy and spectacular advantage of performer dexterity, endurance, and range as well as containing many moments of intense gravitas and sweeping lush melodies, typical of late-romantic and early modern music.
The audience will be amazed at the technical lightness, precision, and discrete multifaceted articulations of which the modern tuba is capable, along with its inherent ability to produce immense power and force of sound when called for in the music.
Adam is not only a preeminent tubist with The Repasz Band; he is also a 25-year veteran principal tubist with the Binghamton Philharmonic and Tri-Cities Opera Orchestra. In addition Peck has performed with the Albany Symphony, York Symphony, Kushell Symphonia, B.C. Pops, Gettysburg Festival Orchestra, and the Nittany Valley Symphony. He is also a member of Brass Menagerie, a brass quintet based in Elmira, New York.
Of superlative local interest, Williamsport sported at least 3 historical musical instrument manufacturers in the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, the Henry Distin Manufacturing Company, later purchased to become the Brua C. Keefer Manufacturing Company, and The Imperial Instrument Company. All three of these firms produced many varieties brass and other instruments.
Peck has made a passion out of collecting, repairing, restoring, adapting, re-engineering, and trading/selling fascinating varieties of tubas from these chapters of Williamsport history. He is a font of experience and information on many antique, historic, or off the beaten path tubas in many keys and configurations. Additionally he enjoys presenting these instruments to the public and also performing on them whenever possible.
When one attends a summer Repasz Band concert for example, a musical experience and organization abounding and replete with a local history and relevance all its own, one might also hear Adam playing on a lovingly restored historic local instrument with all the fancy engraving, inlays, artistic enamellings, and metal-work of their periods.
Peck himself is a master of all standard tubas, the BBb tuba, the CC tuba, the Eb tuba, and F tuba and is continuously swapping around various instruments to best suit the sound and style of the music.
He also performs regularly on a unique and unusual instrument called a cimbasso. The cimbasso is a low-brass instrument actually considered to be in the trombone family although frequently played by bass-trombonists and tubists alike. The cimbasso has sounds ranging from mellow and warm to brilliantly brassy with an edge of menace. The cimbasso is mostly used with Italian opera scores by Verdi, Puccini and Bellini. In more recent history, the cimbasso has been applied in motion-picture scores.
The Repasz Band is under the musical direction of Albert J. Nacinovich, Conductor, and Gordon Taylor and Jeffrey Dent, Assistant Conductors. The Repasz Band is the oldest American community band in continuous existence since 1831.