Alison Balsom reviews

There was a time when more ‘ordinary’ people attended cathedral services, and liked to hear tunes or texts they recognised when they went there. That’s one basic reason why the peculiarly English type of choral hybrid called the ‘hymn anthem’ developed in the half-century of its heyday, commencing around 1880.

Sound The Trumpet: Royal Music of Purcell & Handel

This charming disc contains some of the most imaginative and polished trumpet playing you’re ever likely to hear. Alison Balsom and Trevor Pinnock have taken music with royal associations and arranged it for trumpet and orchestra. Trumpet both introduces, and also ‘sings’, the dazzlingly virtuosic aria ending Handel’s opera Amadigi. Elsewhere, it becomes the soloist of Handel’s First Oboe Concerto (with strikingly sensitive orchestral accompaniment).

Seraph (Alison Balsom)

Unusually, James MacMillan is somewhat coy as to why his Trumpet Concerto has the title Seraph. Was he thinking of the instrument’s traditional angelic associations? Or has it more to do with dedicatee Alison Balsom’s uncanny ability to make the trumpet sing, weaving silvery-smooth long lines or pirouetting sweetly like an operatic coloratura soprano?

Alison Balsom: Italian Concertos

Despite its brilliance and distinctiveness, notably in Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto, the natural trumpet’s restricted notes, and therefore range of keys, severely limited its concerto repertoire in the Baroque era.

Alison Balsom: Caprice (Popular Trumpet Works)

The young British trumpeter Alison Balsom is a real star: resplendent and well-varied tone, crisp attack, absolute ease of production throughout the range. What a shame, then, that she and EMI have so little faith in the instrument’s own repertoire that they’ve made this showcase disc out of arrangements. A couple of Piazzolla tangos are suitably smoochy and bouncy, Rachmaninov’s Vocalise works surprisingly well, Arban’s virtuoso cornet fantasia on Bellini’s Norma (with a spruced-up accompaniment) is exhilarating.

The Fam'd Italian Masters

Peter Holman makes a convincing case for accompanying trumpet pieces one-to-a-part and the solo strings are sparklingly transparent, if at the cost of a momentary purple patch in unison violin tuning. But surprisingly they also balance the two trumpets, without audible manipulation of the recording. John Hawkins wrote that the famous Baroque trumpeter John Shore sounded ‘sweet as an hautboy’, an ideal which Steele-Perkins wholeheartedly embraces. He has found a remarkable duet partner in Alison Balsom, a touch less discreet than he perhaps, but every bit as fluent.