Classical Editor: Rob Barnett
 

Music Webmaster
Len Mullenger: Len@musicweb-international.com



SOVIET TRUMPET CONCERTOS

ALEXANDER ARUTYUNYAN
(b. 1920)
Trumpet Concerto (1950)
Variations for trumpet and orchestra
ALEXANDRA PAKHMUTOVA
(b.1929)
Trumpet Concerto (1955)
MOISEI VAINBERG

Trumpet Concerto (1967)
Bibi Black (trumpet)
Moscow Chamber Orchestra/Constantine Orbelian
CHANDOS CHAN 9668 [72.05]
Crotchet
 Amazon UK  Amazon USA

Here are four works for trumpet and orchestra all from the pre-Perestroika USSR.

The Arutyunian is a singularly attractive work dating from 1950. It is brilliant (as you would expect), languorously suggestive of warm summer nights in the Caucasus and, in places, a hair's breadth from Gershwin's blues. Those of you who may have heard the violin concerto this is a much more attractive work given a strapping performance and vivid recording. The big theme struts like a toreador.

The Variations are as strikingly memorable - a warm steady flow of orientally-accented lyricism alternates with ripe and pert virtuosity. There is none of the hieratic minimalism we get from Hovhaness whenever he is put near an orchestra and a trumpet. Philip Taylor's lucid and informative notes suggest parallels with Kabalevsky.

The Pakhmutova concerto is bright, eager, imaginative and not a moment too long.

Vainberg's concerto is again a work of technical challenge. It is more modernistic than the Arutyunian; rather like a Malcolm Arnold concerto but with a higher dosage of dissonance (nothing to frighten anyone off but noticeable all the same).

All the usual high production values from Chandos.

Reviewer

Rob Barnett


Reviewer

Rob Barnett


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