Baroque Concertos

Most 18th-century trumpet music was written for the notoriously difficult “natural” trumpet on which different notes are produced entirely, and arduously, through the player’s lips. It’s often stratospherically high in pitch, beyond the comfortable range of the modern valved instrument, so today’s trumpeters have to find a way of accessing this repertoire without resorting to learning an entirely new technique. Enter the piccolo trumpet, a smaller and higher valved instrument first championed and popularised by Maurice André. The great 20th-century French trumpeter proved that players could tackle music composed for the pre-valve age, as well as concertos originally composed for flute, oboe or violin. “André was a remarkable and expressive performer, with an extraordinarily beautiful sound,” Balsom tells Apple Music Classical. “The tone that he was able to create on the piccolo trumpet is something that is almost operatic.” Balsom has had a long and rich relationship with Baroque music (her “first love”, as she puts it), playing it to scintillating effect on both natural and modern B-flat trumpets. Here, however, she follows in André’s footsteps, innovatively combining piccolo trumpet and Baroque ensemble to unlock a whole new world of concertos by Vivaldi, Albinoni, Marcello, Telemann and Handel. “Choosing what to include on this album was an organic and painstaking but ultimately very rewarding experience that took place over a number of years,” Balsom tells Apple Music Classical of her concerto line-up. “I spent a couple of months in California at the beginning of 2023 which is when I did all of the work choosing exactly which concertos would make it onto the final album. This involved finding, practising and learning many concertos written for flute, oboe, violin, harpsichord and so on. It was a thrilling moment when I felt definitively that a piece was working for the piccolo trumpet.” Having made her choices, Balsom approached arranger Simon Wright to a