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Alison Balsom‘s fourth CD for EMI Classics features Franz Joseph Haydn and Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s evergreen trumpet concertos, coupled with concertos by Johann Baptist Georg Neruda and Giuseppe Torelli. Balsom also directs Die Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen.
The Haydn Trumpet Concerto is arguably the most popular work for the instrument as well as one of the composer’s best known compositions, a favourite of performers and audiences alike for its wonderful melodic invention and challenging virtuosity. Reviewing Alison’s performance with the Milwaukee Symphony in March of this year, the Journal Sentinel wrote, “Alison Balsom’s details of attack, release, dynamics and timbre polished Haydn’s … Trumpet Concerto into an exquisite little gem. …This concerto … has its moments of brilliant bugling. More often, though, it [shows the short-lived keyed trumpet] capable of a refined sort of expression …. Balsom excelled at both facets of the concerto. She snapped off staccato 16ths with ease and signal calls with clarion purity and power. And she shaped and colored Haydn’s gentle, lyrical lines with the grace and warmth of a really good Mozartean mezzo.”
