Alison Balsom MAGIC TRUMPET

MAGIC TRUMPET

 

Alison Balsom / The Englsih Concert / Trevor Pinnock SOUND THE TRUMPET

An interview in the booklet for this disc takes a long time telling us why Alison Balsom has picked up a Baroque trumpet for this disc but EMI could have saved their ink, for when the instrument is played as fluidly agreeably as it is here, nobody could doubt that it is the right tool for the job (and it’s not, by the way, the first time she has recorded on one – in 2002 she made an admired debut with the Parley of Instruments for Hyperion.

Balsom’s real point, however, is that it was the valveless trumpet’s vocal quality, its ‘human characteristic’ that informed its music and it is this above all that she demonstrates through her choice of music for this album. For it is not fanfares and tattoos that dominate, nor even concertos, but a smartly selected sequence of trumpet cameos from the theatre scores and elegant social music of Purcell and Handel. Some are real, including symphonies from Purcell’s semi-operas or Handel’s Eternal source of light divine; in some, such as Purcell’s ‘Plaint’ and Handel’s Oboe Concerto No 1, she borrows other instruments’ lines; and others see her literally slip into the singer’s place, most strikingly in Purcell’s ‘Fairest Isle’ and ‘Sound the trumpet’.

And it all works. This is rattling good music, and so easily does the trumpet fit into it that often it is hard to recall what the original scorings were anyway. Balsom, too, sounds utterly at home, whether intertwining coolly spun traceries with oboe and violin in the wondrous Symphony from King Arthur or merrily disporting in Handel’s Water Piece. She’s ably partnered by two of the finest young Baroque singers in the business (Lucy Crowe especially impressive in ‘The Plaint’) and wonderfully backed by the English Concert and the bright natural musicianship of Trevor Pinnock. Never mind the whys and wherefores – just sit back and enjoy! (Lindsay Kemp / Gramophone)

Alison Balsom / Balsom Ensemble ROYAL FIREWORKS

With an album of celebration – both joyful and solemn – trumpeter Alison Balsom again declares her love for the baroque era, which she calls “the golden age of the trumpet”. Joining Handel’s exuberant Music for the Royal Fireworks are works by two other German-born composers – JS Bach and Telemann – and by the London-born Henry Purcell. “These baroque composers knew the instrument they were writing for,” says Balsom. “There is such value in searching out the sound that they would have heard themselves, with the intention of authenticity. When it comes together it is utterly thrilling.”

Alison Balsom JUBILO Bach - Corelli - Torelli - Fasch

With this release Alison records on the natural trumpet for the first time since the hugely successful album Sound the Trumpet. Inspired by seasonal Baroque repertoire, the recording includes Bach’s concertos by Corelli, Torelli, and Fasch performed with the Academy of Ancient Music under the direction of violinist Pavlo Beznosiuk. The Schübler Chorales and In dulce jubilo by Bach, performed in arrangements for trumpet and organ played here by Stephen Cleobury, act as a beautiful foil to the full orchestral sound of the concertos. Bach’s Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring featuring Stephen Cleobury and the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge tops off this Christmas cracker of an album. This classy winter-themed album is a perfect core classical seasonal offering. The release coincides with a major tour of Germany.

Alison Balsom / Tom Poster LÉGENDE

Star trumpeter Alison Balsom adds her first recital with piano to her rich Warner Classics catalogue. Recorded live at St George’s, Bristol, she and Tom Poster, her long-standing recital partner, explore fascinating works from the 20th century, by composers such as Enescu, Hindemith, Martinů, Françaix, Bernstein and Peter Maxwell Davies. They also present a work they themselves have composed jointly: The Thoughts of Dr. May, inspired by Brian May, lead guitarist of the rock band Queen.

2013 Gramophone Artist of the Year, three-time winner at the Classic BRITs and also three-time winner at the Echo Klassik Awards, Alison Balsom has cemented an international reputation as one of classical music’s great ambassadors and is ranked amongst the most distinctive and ground-breaking musicians on the international circuit today. “This day has been a long time coming,” she says. “We’ve wanted to record this … most important repertoire for trumpet and piano since we started playing together more than 10 years ago.” (Warner Classics)

Alison Balsom ARUTIUNIAN - MacMILLAN - ZIMMERMANN Trumpet Concertos

British trumpet player Alison Balsom has established herself as one of the leading performers on her instrument in the early 21st century. This 2012 album features three modern and contemporary concertos for trumpet. Balsom is phenomenally secure in her technique and in the musicality she brings to each of the pieces. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Lawrence Renes, and the Scottish Ensemble, led by Jonathan Morton, provide colorful and energetic accompaniment. Bernd Alois Zimmermann's 1954 Trumpet Concerto is the standout work on the album. It is certainly one of the most distinguished, substantial, and immediately appealing trumpet concertos of the 20th century. It is subtitled "Nobody knows de troubles I see," and uses the melody of the spiritual as the basis for its sophisticated musical development. Like many of Zimmermann's works, its themes are political and he changed the title from "seen" to "see" to highlight the ongoing struggle for racial equality throughout the world, with pointed reference to the lingering racist attitudes of National Socialism in post-war Germany. It's an intensely dramatic and inventive piece; Zimmermann interweaves the original spiritual with jazz influences and modernist techniques in a way that's emotionally direct and thoroughly engrossing. Balsom negotiates its extreme demands with complete assurance. The Trumpet Concerto in A flat by Armenian composer Alexander Arutiunian, written in 1950, bears the stamp of the Soviet demand that music be immediately entertaining for the proletariat. The concerto is tuneful and uses folk material and for the most part sounds like it could be the soundtrack for an "exotic" adventure film. What it lacks in musical sophistication it makes up for in the opportunities it gives the soloist to really shine melodically. James MacMillan's 2010 concerto Seraph, which Balsom premiered, is an inoffensive but not especially profound work, characterized by pleasant, lyrical note-spinning. EMI's sound is pristine, balanced, and nicely ambient. (Stephen Eddins)

Alison Balsom / Crispian Steele-Perkins / The Parley of Instruments THE FAM'D ITALIAN MASTERS

Until the middle of the seventeenth century, the trumpet was essentially a ceremonial instrument, played by soldiers and courtly attendants rather than musicians; it was normally used in trumpet-and-drum bands, in which fanfares and popular tunes were clothed in improvised drone accompaniments. However, German composers such as Michael Praetorius and Heinrich Schütz began to experiment with using trumpets in composed art music around 1620, and soon after 1650 composers began to write concerted sonatas for one or two trumpets with strings and continuo—the repertory that is explored in this disc.

It is normally thought that the first trumpet sonatas were written in Bologna. The earliest printed trumpet sonatas were certainly published in 1665 by Maurizio Cazzati, maestro di capella at San Petronio in Bologna between 1657 and 1671, and the archives at San Petronio contain a large repertory of sonatas, sinfonias and concertos with trumpets, some of which are included on this CD. However, there are trumpet sonatas surviving in manuscripts in northern European libraries that may be just as early or even earlier. A case in point is the sonata by the Roman composer and singer Alessandro Melani. It is found in manuscript at Uppsala in Sweden, probably copied in the 1680s or ’90s though a shorter version for a single trumpet in an Oxford manuscript may go back to the middle of the century. The piece is in an early style and is in C major rather than D major, the standard key for later Italian trumpet music. The piece is also unusual in that the violin parts are in scordatura (using violins tuned b-e'-b'-e'' instead of g-d'-a'-e''). It is not clear whether that was part of Melani’s original conception, though it certainly creates an unusual and attractive sonority.

Alessandro Stradella was another important early composer of trumpet music. Like Melani, he worked in Rome for much of his career, though by 1681, when he wrote the wedding cantata Il barcheggio, he was living in Genoa; he was murdered in a Genoese street the following February and Il barcheggio is said to have been his last work. Its self-contained sinfonia sounds remarkably modern, partly because it uses a bright scoring with three equal treble parts, and partly because it has a clear four-movement structure, with logical harmonic patterns.

Another early trumpet work is the sonata by Andrea Grossi, published in his Op 3 of 1682. It has a some archaic features—for instance, the trumpet tends to alternate rather than combine with the upper strings—though the central adagio, featuring the trumpet in an expressive rather than virtuosic role, is unusual for the time. Little is known about Grossi, though he is known to have been a violinist in the service of the Duke of Mantua around 1680.

The three trumpet works in this programme by Bologna composers offer a sample of forms and styles around 1700. The sonata by Giuseppe Maria Jacchini has the same three-treble scoring as the Stradella sinfonia, though it is more old-fashioned in its structure and musical language: it is relatively short-winded and is a patchwork of six short, contrasted sections. Jacchini was a cellist in the musical establishment at San Petronio from 1680 until his death in 1727, and may have been partly responsible for developing the cello as a solo instrument in concerted sonatas; in the present sonata the central trumpet solo has a soloistic bass part that is clearly intended for his instrument.

In the sonatas by Lazzari and Torelli the cello is given a proper solo accompanied by a separate continuo part; in the Lazzari it has an expressive duet with the first violin, while in the Torelli it has a duet with the trumpet. Both works illustrate the trend around 1700 to more virtuosic and idiomatic writing, and for longer, more logically organized separate movements instead of the old ‘patchwork’ structures. Lazzari was a Franciscan monk who worked in his native Bologna throughout his life, with the exception of two periods spent in Venice. Torelli was also a native of Bologna and worked there until 1696, though he spent most of his later career in Germany.

We do not know where and when Vivaldi wrote his well-known concerto, his only work for trumpets and strings. It is similar in idiom to some Bologna works, though it is in C major rather than D major—a distinctive feature found in other works by Vivaldi with trumpet.

As a contrast to the major-key and generally lively trumpet works, we have included some contemporary examples of four-part string sonatas. The sonata à quattro was less popular at the time than the ubiquitous trio sonata, and is rather neglected today, though it contains a wealth of fine music with a preponderance of introspective, minor-key works—as this CD demonstrates. It is also of interest in that the genre is the true ancestor of the Classical string quartet. The sonatas by Cazzati and Vitali are typical examples of Bolognese four-part sonatas: they are relatively brief, are full of dense counterpoint and have chromatic sections. Vitali was born in Bologna and studied with Cazzati, though he spent most of his career at the Modenese court.

The sonatas by Legrenzi and Scarlatti are also densely contrapuntal, though they are quite different in style. Legrenzi was working in Venice in 1673, when he published his Op 10, and dedicated the collection to the Austrian emperor Leopold I, which is presumably why it includes two sonatas for four viols and continuo. Viols were largely obsolete in Italy at the time, but were still cultivated a good deal in Austria. This is probably why the sonata recorded here was printed in a double-clef format, allowing it to be played in C minor on viols and in E minor by a string quartet. In the work Legrenzi achieves a remarkable synthesis between the contrapuntal idiom of the Renaissance and the chromatic harmony of his own time. We do not know anything about the origins of Alessandro Scarlatti’s work, except that it is found in manuscripts in Paris and Münster as a sonata for string quartet ‘senza cembalo’, but as a concerto with continuo and additional ripieno string parts as the first of a set of Six Concertos published in London around 1740. It is likely, however, that the concerto version is not Scarlatti’s work, and was cobbled together in eighteenth-century England; the additional parts certainly do not add anything to the original.

Two features of this recording are worthy of comment. First, all the works are played one to a part. There is no doubt that the sonata à quattro was essentially thought of as chamber music rather than orchestral music around 1700, even though the genre was often used in church. Furthermore, Richard Maunder has recently argued that the concerto was normally a one-to-a-part genre during the Baroque period; the vast majority of all Baroque concertos survive only in single sets of parts, even in places such as San Petronio in Bologna, where other genres were performed with large forces. Second, it has become fashionable in recent years to use large continuo groups of plucked instruments in all sort of Baroque music. However, the printed and manuscript sources of the repertory recorded here normally only have a single continuo part, most commonly labelled ‘organo’. For this reason we have used a fine Italian-style organ by Goetze and Gwynn for this recording. It is typical of the single-manual instruments used in Italian Baroque churches, and is much more powerful than the small portable chest instruments usually heard in modern performances and recordings. (Peter Holman)

Alison Balsom SOUND THE TRUMPET Royal music of PURCELL & HANDEL

It would seem that Alison Balsom has become about as popular as a classical trumpet player can be. She has a half dozen well-received recordings. She plays the Haydn with warmth and grace, with a clear, penetrating tone. Her cadenza in the first movement is ideal in demonstrating her virtuosity without distracting us from the (eventual) flow of the movement. In this new disc, expertly accompanied by Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert, she plays mostly transcriptions and all on natural, valveless trumpets. She calls such instruments “an adventure.”
One of her adventures, which does sound entirely natural, is taking the second countertenor part on Purcell’s Sound the Trumpet, playing alongside the countertenor Iestyn Davies. As the part was meant to have trumpet-like phrases as well as introduce a trumpet later, this transcription seems virtually to be taking Purcell at his word. Not so inevitable is Handel’s Oboe Concerto with the trumpet taking the solo part. It’s hard to hear this concerto without an oboe echoing in one’s head, but, according to Balsom, the performance is meant to extend our understanding of the emotional range of the trumpet. Davies is also heard to great effect on Handel’s Eternal source of light divine, where Balsom sounds virtually heavenly in her responses. Lucy Crowe is heard in “The Plaint” from The Fairy Queen. Again, Balsom is a sensitive second voice. Balsom and Pinnock have assembled suites of music from Purcell’s longer works, and made a somewhat new thing out of Handel’s Water Music. At times they make the trumpet sound like a plaintive voice: Mostly it is celebratory and outgoing, or dignified and martial, as in the Overture to Atalanta. The recorded sound is excellent; the playing superb. I am sure that these performances won’t replace the original settings, but they cast a fresh, charming light on music many of us already know.(Michael Ullman)