MARBECKS COLLECTABLE: Arnold: Three Shanties / Patterson: Comedy for Five Winds / Holst: Wind Quintet

That Paul Patterson's music possessed a razor-sharp sense of humour was already evident in his op.1, Rebecca (1965). By 1972, however, when the Comedy for five winds was written for the Vega Wind Quintet, one can hear just how much further his deployment of musical humour has developed, with a sophistication in its use of pastiche and its sense of comic timing far removed from the earlier work's scattershot, "anything goes" brand of comedy.