Category: SOLOS - B♭. Cornet/Trumpet with Piano Composer: Rutland Boughton
Trumpet in Bb. / C with piano reduction.
First performance given by John Wallace and the Fife Sinfonia 23 September 1980. Recorded on the ASV label by John Wallace and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra for release in Spring 2005.
Rutland Boughton (1878- 1960) is unique in the history of British music on two main counts: the Glastonbury Festivals, which he ran with great success from 1914 to 1926 and for which he composed a series of major music - dramas, and for his opera ‘The Immortal Hour’ which was phenomenally popular in London during the 1920s and ‘SOs. In 1927 he took up residence at Kilcot on the Gloucester Herefordshire borders where, in the intervals of small-scale farming, he continued to write imaginatively for the stage. But he also turned his attention to other forms of music, including two fine symphonies and a number of important concertos.
The Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra was composed in the August and September of 1943. Boughton dedicated it to his youngest son, Brian, who was then studying trumpet at the Royal College of Music under Ernest Hall. Apart from his delight in writing pieces to encourage the musically- gifted members of his family (the splendid oboe concerto he wrote in 1937 for his daughter Joy - one of this country’s leading soloists - is a case in point), Boughton seems to have had no particular player or occasion in mind when he planned the Trumpet Concerto and was probably greatly disheartened when both Ernest Hall and George Eskdale [principal trumpet of the L.S.O.) declared it too difficult for performance. Boughton appears to have played it through at the piano with the young William Overton, and then laid it on one side. Thus, after a delay of nearly fifty years, John Wallace’s performances with the Fife. Sinfonia were the first!
As Boughton was a composer who was able to express his very considerable imagination entirely by means of traditional forms and an orthodox musical vocabulary, his work poses few problems to the attentive listener. The two movements of the Trumpet Concerto move effortlessly through a series of contrasted sections and moods, each marked by a definite change of speed.
As befits an overtly virtuoso work, the accent is primarily on the soloist — though Boughton’s colourful orchestration allows the accompanying players appropriate moments of glory.
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