“Dedicated to all the trumpet players who play church gigs every Sunday and are always forced to play softer than the singers” is the generous inscription to the trumpeting brotherhood. Apart from Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 (which one is unlikely to hear at Matins), this is a record of well-known voluntaries – pieces usually played without a singer in sight. Interspersed are five sonatas by Torelli, a composer Wynton Marsalis has recorded before. Having listened to all 120-odd movements of Torelli’s trumpet music in an end-to-end D major extravaganza some months back (Bongiovanni, 5/95), I must say that patience is certainly a virtue if you are looking for pieces of real quality. Sinfonia con tromba, TV8, is one such example, with an imploring opening of great beauty (performed exquisitely by Eklund on a recent Naxos disc – see above) followed by a sizzling fugato which Marsalis nails, to use parlance of the brotherhood.
But what does this disc tell us about Marsalis? Firstly, that his legion reputation for switching effortlessly back and forth between jazz and classical idioms is still a prized asset, and one which this fine player clearly intends to nurture. That Marsalis is so much more a jazzer than a classical player is irrelevant; if he so wishes, he can clock into a broad ‘baroque’ style and his musical instincts do the rest. At best, these are a thrilling cocktail of gleaming virtuosity and gleeful embellishment. At worst, he leaves too much to direction which, along with the kitsch arrangements, is pretty hard-driven; antediluvian mordents are played with a regularity likely to make orthodox authenticists out of the mildest. Yet there is much to enjoy here. The Dandrieu is splendid and Marsalis plays the stratospheric part in Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 with such soaring authority (despite a tendency to sharpness) that one forgets that he probably returned instantly to the blues, three octaves down and not a bead of sweat later. The sound gives the trumpet due prominence which rules out much dialogue in the Bach.'