Greatest trumpet concerto in 200 years?
OrchestrasThat’s what soloist Alison Balsom is saying about Wynton Marsalis’s new piece which she plays with the LSO tonight.
She writes:
I have spent my life devoted to classical music, but it was Dizzy Gillespie who inspired me to start playing the trumpet when I was seven. And is there a more ideal personification of the sophistication, the uncompromising intellectual rigour, the swagger or the seductive power of jazz than Wynton Marsalis? Surely the foremost living champion of jazz, he is also a prolific composer of music for symphony orchestra. His jazz opera Blood on the Fields won him the 1997 Pulitzer prize, and he wrote his acclaimed violin concerto in 2015 for Nicola Benedetti – for which she won a Grammy.
Now, finally, he has written a concerto for his own instrument, and I believe it to be the most important and impactful piece written for the trumpet in the 200 or so years since Hummel’s Concerto emerged from the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Marsalis loves the trumpet. He knows how to explore every characteristic it possesses in a way no one ever has before. His piece shows the many characters the trumpet can inhabit, and the boundaries it joyfully disregards. It is a huge physical and mental challenge and includes every possible technical difficulty, but it is written and orchestrated so well, and with a musical point behind every idea, that it’s a pleasure to play from start to finish.
Are you listening Michael Sachs?..
He played it in Cleveland.
Marsalis wrote it for him and he premiered it, in fact.
I heard Micheal Sachs and the Cleveland Orchestra perform this work. Everything I’d previously heard of Marsalis was written very knowingly, sound technically, and with a good ear for instrumentation, yet I found they didn’t sustain the interest required by their length. Nothing made me want to hear them three times. They were wise, workmanlike, and even a little gimmicky. The Trumpet Concerto was far and away much better being both a fun and compelling listen. It could definitely become a trumpet repertoire work. He is in his element here.
Do we count the Shostakovich Piano and Trumpet?
We do not.
Marsalis is such a complete artist mastering classic and jazz repertoire. That’s an achievement. His Lincoln center band is probably among the best jazz group which can be listened to. Lots of class.
I’m pretty sure the gentleman in the photo is not Marsalis. Who is he?
Sam Mendes. Film director. Husband of Alison Balsom. Oops. Sir Sam Mendes!
That’s her husband, Sam Mendes
Husband no.2, Sam Mendes.
Poor Ed Gardner…
Austria-Hungary was established in 1867, several decades after Hummel’s death.
“And is there a more ideal personification of the sophistication, the uncompromising intellectual rigour, the swagger or the seductive power of jazz than Wynton Marsalis?”
Absolutely! Go back to where you started with Dizzy Gillespie. Marsalis can’t hold a candle to him.
Or Fats Narvarro, or Clifford Brown, or Miles Davis, or Terrance Blanchard, or Clark Terry, or Louis Armstrong.
Assessing works in terms of ‘the most important’ or ‘greatest’ in a genre demeans what music is and it means to people. Alison is a gifted and subtle artist, so this hubris seems out of character.
The extraordinary Maxwell Davies trumpet concerto is one example of a work that deserves enduring prominence alongside new works by composers like Marsalis.