Alison Balsom (across a prolific recording career featuring 15 albums and counting) has long led listeners where the trumpet traditionally treads (Purcell, Haydn, Hummel and so on) as well as into musical modernity courtesy of new works. Acclaim has followed, along with a profile she’s used well to champion both the trumpet and classical music in general. But to mark her 20th anniversary in the studio, an anniversary sealed with a further five-year deal with her label Warner Classics, Balsom has turned – or rather returned – to a piece with which she first found fledgling fame, and one she’s carried in her consciousness ever since. And from it she’s crafted an album that’s intriguingly exploratory, even by her standards.

It was with Copland’s haunting Quiet City that the then teenage trumpeter triumphed as a concerto finalist in the 1998 BBC Young Musician of the Year competition. That year’s overall event was won by percussionist Adrian Spillett, for whose career the competition served as a successful springboard; for Balsom, however, it proved a launchpad of rocket-propelling proportions. But while there’s a nice resonance in returning to Quiet City to mark a milestone, it’s very clear the work means more to Balsom than being a mere mental souvenir. Even back then, Quiet City, for her, embodied how she felt about her instrument and its sound; it was ‘the composition that encapsulated exactly’ how she saw the trumpet.

Alison Balsom at the recording sessions (photo: Hugh Carswell)

It’s on this work that Balsom has built a programme reflecting that fertile but frictional era of American history that is the first half of the 20th century, a time when classical music and jazz often met and mingled, producing some of the most beloved creations in today’s canon.

Balsom’s career, however, has invariably involved mixing things up, reaching for repertoire wherever she finds it. ‘I listen to classical music all the time, and I see myself firmly steeped in that tradition,’ she tells me, as we sit down to explore her new album, named after that Copland work. ‘And yet the trumpet is such a left-field instrument. But instead of that making me feel marginalised, it allows me – if you want to put a positive spin on it – the opportunity to see how the instrument can break down genre barriers, and to see what it can say in a cohesive way, but not necessarily within a niche style label.’ This seems an excellent way to kick off conversation about an album drawing on such an eclectic selection of musicians as Copland, Gershwin, Ives, Bernstein, Miles Davis and Gil Evans. ‘With a Purcell and Handel disc’, Balsom continues, ‘I’m always wondering how I can reach people who are perhaps nervous about picking it up, and I try to talk about it in terms that are universal. This album is much easier to do that with. With Davis and Evans being such a part of the general culture, it’s much easier to talk about it in universal terms – how it makes you feel and how powerful the music is; rather than in terms of the labels of where it comes from and when it was written.’

Alison Balsom (photo: Simon Fowler)

But first, let’s return to the beginning of both the album and Balsom’s career, and to Copland’s Quiet City. As the work is so personal to her, it’s not surprising that she ‘had such a specific set of ideas about how I wanted it to sound and how I wanted it to feel, the way we were miked, the string sound, where everybody was placed, where the acoustic panelling was – I’d really, really thought about this,’ she says, exuding a gratifying passion for the process of recording.

‘Pieces like this are like the Haydn Trumpet Concerto – not technically all that complicated, but very much improved by you bringing more of yourself to it, from your life experience. I felt that very much with the Copland piece. And having known it for so long and not recorded it, it felt like a huge moment.’

‘It was a really thrilling, seat-of-the-pants way of working – it was the only way that I could bring “Rhapsody in Blue” together’

But given her love of the piece, and the diversity of her discography to date, why the wait? ‘I think the wait was because I’ve been wanting to curate it. I wanted there to be a context for it, and until now I didn’t have one. I waited for the concept to come together in my head, and then when it did start falling into place, the momentum took over.’

Quiet City began life in 1939 as incidental music for an Irwin Shaw play for small instrumental ensemble, before being expanded by Copland in 1940 into a stand-alone 10-minute work for trumpet, cor anglais and string orchestra. For the album, Balsom’s first-class colleagues are the Britten Sinfonia and founder member and principal oboist Nicholas Daniel. Reflecting on the gorgeous interplay between trumpet and cor anglais which weaves through the piece, Balsom points to ‘a couple of very key and beautiful meeting points where we play together as a duet. Very seldom do they happen – so when they do, it’s very satisfying and very enjoyable musically. And Nick being such an innate, instinctive musician in terms of how to phrase, how to balance, it was very inspiring to stand next to him and play together. When you’re playing with an instrument that is so different and yet so similar in some of the colours, it really opens your mind in terms of what you can do to blend together.’

Alison Balsom at the recording sessions (photo: Hugh Carswell)

The rest of the album unfolds from there. First we step into the melancholy evening air of Bernstein’s ‘Lonely Town’ pas de deux, which is followed by the more flamboyant virtuosity of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, then Ives’s The Unanswered Question, and finally the arrangements by Gil Evans for Miles Davis of a movement from Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez and Weill’s ‘My Ship’.

Of the project’s origins, Balsom recalls, ‘I went to my usual place and said to myself: “Let me show the world how versatile the trumpet is, and I’m going to cover every possible American theme and idea: musicals, films, contemporary, classical, jazz, folk … – and then I calmed down and thought, “This isn’t a lecture recital, it’s an album, and you can say just one thing rather than 6000 things.” But I was interested to see what there was in the canon that would show the trumpet in the way that I wanted to on this album.’ Which was how? ‘I wanted it all to feel quite inward-looking,’ she says, noting that even Rhapsody in Blue has moments of serene beauty. And while it’s true that on so much of the album the trumpet is both elegiac and reflective, in a moving way it also retains the role in which it’s so often cast – that of herald, though here that’s less in terms of a fanfare and more in terms of gentle calling, questioning, even consoling.

‘I do think those heralding moments are very evocative,’ she says. ‘Since I started playing Quiet City it’s always evoked very visual ideas of New York for me – not that I’d even been to New York when I started playing it, but I could imagine the idea of playing out of an apartment-block window, looking across to the other side of the street. It’s almost like an Edward Hopper painting. It’s inward-looking, but it’s also calling out a question: “Am I alone – is anyone there?” And that’s exactly what we’re talking about when we get to the Ives.’

This is the second cover story I’ve written in recent months which has turned towards Ives’s extraordinary and enigmatic masterpiece The Unanswered Question. Perhaps, more than a century since its earliest incarnation, it speaks somehow to our own age’s concerns with a particular poignancy.

‘For me, the most powerful part of that piece is the string writing,’ Balsom says, referring to the ethereal foundations which hold the increasingly discordant dialogue of trumpet and flutes both aloft and at bay. ‘I take for granted the trumpet sound because I’m the trumpeter, and when it comes in I feel privileged that I get to be part of this piece. But when that first string chord starts, I immediately feel I can see the universe, I can see those incredible photos of the whole galaxy – if that was a sound, that would be it! And the fact that there’s this incredible trumpet question that runs throughout the piece feels right to me – it feels like the trumpet is the right solitary, gorgeous, but lonely voice to ask those questions. But the string writing is just iconic. It’s actually the earliest thing on the whole disc in terms of when it was written, in 1908, and it’s incredibly original and pioneering for the time, and even now it feels incredibly contemporary.

‘Obviously there were lots of challenges in terms of how to physically place the trumpet, where I should be recording from in order to create the effect that we wanted; but the piece – it’s almost like a meditation, or a place where you go to take yourself out of your mind and far beyond the daily trials of the world.’

For all those physical considerations, it must, I suggest, be an extraordinary work to perform live. ‘You have many, many people in a space – and you can hear a pin drop. That phrase is never more powerful than when you hear the beginning of this piece, because everyone is completely engaged. It starts so quietly, and your first thought is, “Has it started or is that my imagination?” And then it has started, and you’re so intrigued. You never hear fidgeting, or coughing – you don’t hear anything because you’re so aware of having been transported immediately to a new place.’

Alison Balsom (photo: Simon Fowler)

The piece immediately preceding the Ives on the disc is one of the most performed of all 20th-century works, one ushered in by probably the most iconic soaring line ever gifted to an instrumentalist – be they clarinettist or, indeed, trumpeter. It was Balsom’s idea to commission a new arrangement of Rhapsody in Blue from Gershwin’s two-piano original (which had just fallen out of copyright, with Ferde Grofé’s famous orchestration remaining in copyright for a while yet) and featuring a new prominent trumpet part. She approached Simon Wright. ‘He is so brilliant, and understands brass instruments so well.’ However, she recalls, ‘I think he thought I was bonkers.’ Undeterred, she reassured him, ‘We’re not taking away the piano part, we’re not trying to make it a work for trumpet and orchestra instead – the piano part is still absolutely the centre of the whole thing.’ And so he set about orchestrating it from scratch. The next initial sceptic to be convinced was her regular pianist partner Tom Poster, who was likewise won round. ‘We met up quite early on to just busk through it, to decide what we’d do and what we wouldn’t do. It was a really enjoyable process,’ Balsom recalls. They were joined by the orchestra six weeks before the recording, at which point, she remembers, ‘I wasn’t even doing that famous first run, because “cl” was one of the very few marks Gershwin put in the piano part of the score: that it should be played on the clarinet!’ The exact nature of the arrangement remained in a state of flux right up until a concert two days before the recording. ‘It was a really thrilling, seat-of-the-pants way of working, but that was the only way that I could bring this piece together. It couldn’t be done on a computer in an academic way, you had to do it like this: asking how does it feel live? How does it feel under pressure with an audience? What are the peaks and troughs of the whole piece? Where does the trumpet take the lead and the piano take over? What is the balance of everyone’s conversational contributions? I’d never done anything like that before.’

‘I just thought, “I don’t care, I’m getting as close as possible to that sound world that I’m imagining for this music”’

Going from one bold take on a huge hit to another, this time we have Evans’s arrangement of the Adagio from Concierto de Aranjuez, from his and Miles Davis’s 1960 album ‘Sketches of Spain’. Like Rhapsody in Blue, it’s a work that takes us back to the thrilling and disorientating whirlpool where classical and jazz swirl together so spectacularly – though here perhaps the water spins in the opposite direction. Reinterpreting a classical score is what musicians do; but returning to a jazz composition immortalised in a legendary recording isn’t so often done. Balsom’s desire to do so is rooted in total respect for the original, and a belief that its qualities justify a revisit. ‘It seems so instantaneous,’ she says of the original album. ‘You can hear that the band have been given their music that day, and they’ve turned on the red light – but I think, just because that happened, it doesn’t mean it’s not worth exploring again. And because what they came up with was so good, you have to come at it from a more formal angle, and get those players who are brilliant at classical and jazz (which the Britten Sinfonia are), those people who understand both worlds, and get hold of the sheet music, and explore it and see what happens. I think the material deserves that re-exploration. That was so iconic, and such a complex creation: all the parts were written out, it was all orchestrated. It’s just too interesting not to explore further.’

Did the fact that it’s a work best known from a single recording affect how she approached it? ‘I think the fact that I knew the piece in its recorded version and it spoke to me meant I already knew that I had something I could bring, that I wouldn’t be copying what they did but would be playing what he had composed to go over the top of the orchestral parts from my own heart.’

The score Balsom played from draws on Gil Evans’s manuscripts, as well as transcriptions from the original studio recording and more recently unearthed outtakes from the sessions, plus subsequent live performances by Miles Davis. ‘I tried to learn as much about both the rigour and freedom that would help me play it in the style in which it is written. It was certainly a new way for me to approach a recording, but it didn’t feel completely different, because I was still sticking to the score first and foremost. Other trumpeters have performed this work before me and after Miles Davis, but coming from a classical background, I decided it wasn’t necessary for me to improvise freely around the orchestra, but I stuck close to the “whole” of the Miles Davis “composition”. Primarily I hoped and aspired to play something of which Gil Evans might have approved.’

Alison Balsom recording with Britten Sinfonia under Scott Stroman (photo: Hugh Carswell)

A further aside about the recording of the Rodrigo is that here Balsom laid down her beloved C trumpet to pick up a B flat instrument of uncertain heritage. ‘It actually belongs to my uncle and it’s an old trumpet. I don’t even know what kind of trumpet it is – but it’s got a copper bell and a dark, airy sort of sound. I feel that if you look at it in terms of a singer, the C trumpet I play would be more operatic, a Joyce DiDonato – the beauty of the sound, that’s what I’m obsessively trying to find, to make it ring, to make it sparkle. Whereas for this piece I didn’t want that – I wanted a kind of Nina Simone sound, something a bit different. Something that doesn’t have that resonance, but is more velvety, oaky and gravelly. This is not something I can create that much with my body on my C trumpet. I can do it a tiny bit with my embouchure, but not as much as I need, and that’s why I swapped instruments. The B flat trumpet itself is technically very flawed. It doesn’t have what we have on modern instruments with pipes you can pull out for intonation as you’re playing, and the valves are very noisy – but I just thought, “I don’t care, I’m getting as close as possible to that sound world that I’m imagining for this music.” And it was really smelly, it really smelt of old oil!’

It sounds like a splendidly creative and characterful set of sessions, a hunch confirmed when Balsom concludes with a comment destined to warm the heart of any Gramophone Editor, and I hope of our readers too: ‘Recording is my favourite thing to do. I think there’s a habit – and I still fall into it – where you say, “There’s nothing like live performance, where you get the magic.” But that’s not true, the magic can happen when you construct something in the studio. It’s an absolute art form in itself.’ And that’s a sign-off that bodes wonderfully well for albums 17, 18 and onwards – wherever they lead listeners.

Read the review: Balsom’s Quiet City 

This interview originally appeared in the September 2022 issue of Gramophone magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today