A brass trio may provide lots of food for thought; however, had anyone told me a performance by a trombone, a French horn and a trumpet was going to be highly entertaining, I would have thought they were on some new type of happy pill.

The Malta Arts Festival concert by the Carnyx Brass Trio on July 8 in the President’s Palace Courtyard was characterised not only by highly polished and sophisticated playing, but also a most amusing running commentary delivered with great gusto by trombonist John Kenny.

Kenny is quite obviously the heart, soul and brains behind many a brassy idea and project that is put up in the land where they declaim odes to haggis before eating it.

Apparently, a Carnyx is a 2,000year-old Celtic war horn which Kenny was the first to ever play since Roman times.

The trio is named after this, no doubt formidable, instrument designed to terrify one’s enemies out of their wits.

In fact, at the beginning of the second half of the programme, Kenny played his own composition, La Belle et La Bête for solo trombone.

This led him into declaiming in German, French and English and developing into a sketch describing how trombone players must be mentally challenged and ending in the dismemberment of the instrument and its distribution to the nearest bemused members of a sparse but very appreciative and enthusiastic audience, who at times were in fits of laughter.

In the first half of the programme, I was mentally comparing Kenny’s erudite introductions to the ones given many years ago by legendary oboist Sir Leon Goossens at the Manoel Theatre when I was little more than a (largish) nipper.

By the end of La BelleetLaBête, I had switched comparisons to… who knows? The late, lamented Benny Hill? Make no mistake; John Kenny is to the trombone what Pavarotti was to opera.

His burlesque, over the top as it was, could not diminish his utterly formidable technique and, more importantly, his musicality, producing sounds and effects from this strangely shaped instrument that one could barely imagine in a month of Sundays.

The same could be said about the other members of the Carnyx Trio, Paul Archibald on trumpet and our own home-grown but Scottishnurtured Etienne Cutajar playing French Horn.

Together, the trio produced a concert that was as eclectically diverse as it was intellectually entertaining. Cutajar’s transcriptions of seven of Bach’s Three PartInventions were by far the most orthodox pieces performed.

The rest of the programme was full of surprises and frisson, not to mention discoveries like the ‘very young’ Scottish composer hailing from the middle of nowhere who dreamt up this piece called Parade, which draws much of its inspiration from what Sir Simon Rattle calls ‘the great compositional stir-fry’ going on in New York.

Parade echoed Steve Reich and John Adams and even if its adagio section meandered aimlessly at times, it certainly was a most extraordinary work to have been produced by a 17-year-old.

Etienne Rolin developed from a California beachbum into a formidable composer who was accepted as a student by the legendary Nadia Boulanger and was also a successful artist to boot.

His MiCuitMiCuivre or, Half CookedHalfBrass, was a tongue-incheek composition that was carried off with great style by the trio, as was Francis Poulenc’s quirkily romantic Sonata for Brass Trio, which concluded the programme.

Above all, it was the exposé by each performer of the undreamt-of potential of their instrument that made the evening so memorable. I heard sounds and tones from these three brass instruments that I never believed possible.

Cutajar’s singing and playing combination, which my friend, trumpet player Sigmund Mifsud, who was sitting next to me, informed me was called using a humming chord, was amazing besides aesthetically beautiful.

The formidable technique employed by Paul Archibald in Takemitsu’s weird and wonderful PathsforSoloTrumpet with its twopart Gollum-like dialogue, one with mute and the other without, had to be seen and listened to in order to be believed.

It is so odd how only musicians who have lived and worked in the UK have this deceptively frivolous penchant of presenting music so entertainingly.

Maybe the Proms have something to do with it. Playing and presenting the most difficult and serious of compositions in a selfdepreciative or mock-heroic way is a trait that, as far as I know, is particular to the Queen’s loyal subjects and when it is done well, tastefully and married up with an extraordinary technical level to boot, the effect is simply electrifying.