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Music open thread: Trumpet concertos [1]

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Date: 2025-02-18

The Facebook group Trumpeters Against Trump is still active. At least it was when I checked yesterday. But with poorly socialized weirdo Mark Zuckerberg indulging Trump’s fascism, Facebook groups like Trumpeters Against Trump might be deleted.

Trumpeters Against Trump is not exclusively for trumpeters who dislike Trump. Singers, composers and musicians who play other instruments can also join. Basically, you like music but dislike Nazism.

The most recent post on Trumpeters Against Trump, as of yesterday, is about Trump’s fascistic takeover of the Kennedy Center Honors, and the predictable ensuing loss of talent. The second most recent post, as of yesterday, features a map in which the Gulf of Mexico is split up into el Golfo del Gringo Loco y el Golfo de México.

Last week I started an open thread about horn concertos. Now I’m on to the trumpet, an instrument both very similar to the horn but also very different. I try to post these on Mondays, but yesterday was Presidents’ Day, which I understand to mean only President George Washington and President Abraham Lincoln, and not more recent good presidents like President Joe Biden (D, 2021 — 2025) and certainly not treason aficionado Donald Trump, who currently has the title of president. Trumpeters recoil at being associated with Donald Trump.

The old natural trumpet, like the old natural horn, was limited to one harmonic series. A natural horn in C can play these notes

and hardly any others. Take that up an octave and those are the notes a natural trumpet in C can play. That’s the conclusion I’ve drawn from my study of several symphonies by the Haydn brothers. For horns in C and trumpets in C, the horns are typically limited to C and G, and the trumpets to C and E.

For the most part, you would use a trumpet in C for music in C major. For music in D major, you would then need a trumpet in D, and in a Haydn score it would be mostly limited to D and F-sharp, and occasionally A.

I found it very instructive to watch this video of a performance by the Bremer Barockorchester of Telemann’s Suite in D major, TWV 55:D7. The trumpeter is Julian Zimmermann.

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Leopold Mozart had a great feeling for the horn, and it turns out also for the trumpet. His concerto for the instrument, along with the one by Michael Haydn, are standards of the natural trumpet repertoire, though they’re also played on modern trumpets.

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So you notice that the soloist plays some very high notes. Playing a scale in the lower register of the instrument was just not possible.

Decades before Adolphe Sax with the saxophone, someone (his or her name is lost to history), had the idea that maybe a brass instrument could have keys like a woodwind instrument. And so the keyed trumpet was born, and trumpeter Anton Weidinger commissioned Joseph Haydn to write a concerto for it. In the programme notes for a Los Angeles Philharmonic concert, an uncredited author writes that

[Joseph] Haydn responded to the capability of the instrument like a gleeful child with a new toy. At the outset he indulges in a little teasing, letting the trumpet join the orchestra in the opening tutti for a few notes, all of them playable on the natural trumpet. Only with the first solo entrance does he break new ground, with the trumpet running up the scale from its written middle C, playing notes not possible on the natural trumpet. From then on the trumpet sings, slides around chromatically, skips and jumps, and every now and then plays a fanfare figure, as if Haydn wants to remind us that this new-fangled thing really is a trumpet. Only the middle movement, a song that would be at home in any of Haydn’s operas, is entirely free of trumpet clichés. Haydn occasionally gives the solo trumpet what seems a minor accompaniment part, but they are parts that involve notes that could not previously have been played on a trumpet, and would therefore have had a very different meaning in 1800, jumping out at listeners who knew they were hearing the impossible. The sheer wonder of it is lost on modern listeners who have heard “Flight of the Bumblebee” on a trumpet.

The keyed trumpet never caught on. Trumpeters continued using natural trumpets with various crooks, and composers kept writing for natural trumpet. Changing a crook meant the trumpeter had to stop playing. Trills on low notes were impossible.

And then there was the innovation of valves, allowing a player to change crooks by simply pressing one or more valves. Haydn’s concerto, meant for the keyed trumpet, is nowadays almost always played on a valve trumpet.

The gold standard recording of Joseph Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto in E-flat major is by the distinguished trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. You can find video on YouTube of Wynton Marsalis playing this piece. But I will instead post one by Pacho Flores with the Arctic Philharmonic. The video quality is definitely better than the Marsalis, and the audio engineering is probably also better, but you might like Marsalis’s musical interpretation better than Flores’s.

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The Los Angeles writer mentions that Johannes Brahms and his contemporaries “continued to write parts tailored to the natural trumpet long after the natural trumpet had disappeared.” But in this as in so many other things, Anton Bruckner stood out, right from his own Symphony No. 1 in the same key as Brahms’s First. Richard Birkemeier, writing for the Robb Stewart Brass Instruments blog, explains that

Anton Bruckner, a contemporary of Brahms in Vienna, did write creatively for the valved F trumpet. Bruckner’s First Symphony, written between 1865 and 1866, was scored conservatively for two trumpets crooked in low C. The trumpet parts are characterized by frequent unisons and octaves and adhere primarily to the notes of the harmonic series. Bruckner clearly intended the parts to be played on valved trumpets however, as both parts feature chromatic accidentals and non-harmonic series notes in both the third and fourth movements. Bruckner scored trumpets crooked in low C, matching the key of the symphony, but probably understood that the part would be played on the standard F trumpet. This conclusion is based on the fact that Bruckner asked for no other crook changes in the entire work, regardless of local key or modulations. It might be argued that the composer wrote this symphony for high C trumpets, but the date is too early, and as has been previously stated, F trumpets were employed in Vienna regularly until about 1885. Bruckner consistently scored for F trumpets with crook changes to C until his death in 1896. He is said to have remained loyal to the low F trumpets because of their mellow tone quality rather than scoring for the more common high B-flat trumpet.[17] It is possible that the C trumpet crook designations in Bruckner’s late symphonies may have created some of the impetus for employing the high C trumpet in Vienna. While there is little doubt that rotary-valved B-flat and C trumpets were the standard orchestral instruments in Germany during the last decade of the century, Ed Tarr has discovered that the Austrian trumpeters in the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra played French Besson piston-valved high C trumpets at the turn of the twentieth century.[18]

Now I’m gonna skip ahead to very close to the present day, with Vivian Fung’s Trumpet Concerto premiered by Mary Elizabeth Bowden on trumpet with the Erie Philharmonic. Generally I try to cue these up past any introductory remarks, but in this case the remarks are interesting and relevant to this open thread.

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This performance of the Trumpet Concerto by Alexandra Pakhmutova is not a world premiere, I don’t think.

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The composer Johann Baptist Neruda, any relation to the poet?

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Cornet concertos

I have a little trouble telling the difference between a violin and a viola. I also have a little trouble telling the difference between the trumpet and the cornet. And that’s both visually and aurally. I’m aware that Franck’s Symphony in D minor uses both. So that’s one score to study to learn the difference between the two.

The British composer Philip Sparke seems to be to the cornet as Joseph Haydn is to the trumpet. Here’s Ashley Hall playing the Sparke Cornet Concerto at the 2019 National Trumpet Competition.

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A concerto by Denis Wright is also popular enough to have performances on YouTube, but it’s not as popular as the one by Sparke.

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Flügelhorn concertos

Is the flügelhorn more like a trumpet or more like a “French” horn? The answer from composer Tristan Schulze seems to be that the flügelhorn is more like a trumpet.

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If you wish there were more concerti for your instrument, or concerti for two of your instrument, it’s always a good answer to take a concerto by Antonio Vivaldi and adapt the solo parts for your instrument.

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The open thread question: what is your favorite music with solo parts for trumpet?

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[1] Url: https://dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/18/2268617/-Music-open-thread-Trumpet-concertos?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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