APLAINTIVE trumpet A melody cuts over the plangent sound of the cor anglais. Gentle dissonance reveals the work's modernism: composed in 1939, Aaron Copland's Quiet City is a meditative contemplation of change. It was the piece that Alison Balsom performed in the brass finals of BBC Young Musician in 1998, the competition that propelled the trumpeter into the spotlight and marked the beginning of a new phase for the instrument. Copland's work is the title track to Miss Balsom's latest recording, the first installment in a new five-album deal with Warner Classics.
Such arrangements are now unusual record labels like to leave capacity for the next shiny soloist-but everything about Miss Balsom's career is out of the ordinary: the virtuoso has shown that the trumpet can handle everything from Purcell to Piazzolla. She has premiered concertos by James MacMillan and Guy Barker and breathed new life into classic works by Vivaldi, Bach, and Handel. These feature among her 15-album back-catalog for Warner (then EMI Classics), the cover artwork for which is framed and displayed in her downstairs loo. A sepia-tinged image of Miss Balsom holding a valve-less instrument-the cover for a Baroque programme -watches over visitors as they wash their hands.
'It was the Copland piece that unlocked the expressivity of the trumpet for me,' reveals Miss Balsom. 'It changed how I view the instrument.'
Denne historien er fra August 17, 2022-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra August 17, 2022-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
