Concertos pour trompette

Description

The new trumpet The spectacular blossoming of the trumpet concerto in the second half of the 20th century was directly inspired by the tradition of jazz trumpet, particularly by the genius of Louis Armstrong. Armstrong, along with other jazz trumpeters like Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis after him, introduced a whole new way of playing the trumpet that also revolutionized the classical world. It will therefore come as no surprise that the three concertos on this CD have explicit links to jazz while speaking the language (or languages) of contemporary classical music. The three works, as well as their composers, are also connected to each other through personal channels. Péter Eötvös studied composition with Bernd Alois Zimmermann. As a conductor, he recorded both Aerial by HK Gruber and his own Jet Stream – with Håkan Hardenberger as soloist. Hardenberger, for whom Aerial was written ten years ago and Jet Stream revised, was also one of those responsible for reviving Nobody knows the trouble by Zimmermann after decades of neglect. This trio of concertos certainly deserves to be heard side by side; as a group, they testify to the wide expressive range of the trumpet at the intersection of classical and jazz traditions. In recent years, younger musicians like Clément Saunier have become invested in these important works, which have now truly entered the trumpet repertoire, finding an increasing number of new champions among musicians and new fans among listeners. It is significant that none of the three compositions is simply called "Trumpet Concerto." Each bears a descriptive title that can rightly be termed "programmatic" – though not in the sense of 19th-century program music, which was, in most cases, inspired by pre-existing literary or artistic sources. Our three works are programmatic in a different way. Zimmermann's concerto, the oldest of the three, uses a well-known spiritual – a musical source – and pushes it to places it has never been before. The two more recent works are based on images and extra-musical ideas that are unique to the composers. Through a multiplicity of allusions to other music, each composer has created a special associative network, and by placing the borrowed elements in new contexts, each work communicates something very original. Jazz, while clearly at the center of the three "programs," meant something different for each composer. These Europeans did not simply write music influenced by American jazz, as Stravinsky, Ravel, and so many others had done a hundred years ago. Rather, they offer their own emotional reactions to this art. Zimmermann's work is, above all, a personal meditation on the spiritual. Gruber uses jazz rhythms to evoke a kind of apocalyptic, end-of-the-world vision, while in Eötvös's work, jazz appears as a mysterious new world being discovered. Dr. Peter Laki [...]