Romantic Virtuosity
In 1997, at the age of twelve, Giuliano Sommerhalder travelled from his mountain village of Astano in Ticino to Moscow to take part in the International Trumpet Competition of the Tchaikovsky Conservatory. He won it, but set even greater store by the fact that the "living legends" among Russian trumpeters heard him and offered him their friendship. Timofei Dokshizer, Venyamin Margolin, Yury Usov and others saw in him a potential champion of their great tradition. Late-night discussions around kitchen tables in Moscow caused an ambitious plan to form in the boy's mind. Now, eleven years later, Giuliano Sommerhalder has realized that ambition and has recorded the most important and most masterly of the few original trumpet concertos of the late and neo-Romantic eras in their long lost orchestral versions.
In between, he spent many long years searching for scores and doing research into composers like Vasily Brandt (1869-1923) and Oskar Böhme (1870-1938). Both of these trumpet virtuosos had left Germany for a Russia still ruled by a tsar, only to become enmeshed in the wheels of history in the Stalin era. They left to posterity concertos of almost violinistic virtuosity for their instrument. If Sergey Rakhmaninov had written a trumpet concerto, it would surely sound like the one by Vladimir Peskin (1906-1988), whose biography is hardly less eventful. The Concert Fantasy by the Riemann pupil Gustav Cords (1870-1951) was the showpiece of German trumpet soloists right into the 1950s.
All these works (together with three bravura pieces for the cornet) are now being released on CD. With only one exception, they are all world premiere recordings and prove that beyond laborious transcriptions and musical warhorses in the manner of the Carnival of Venice, interesting and extremely virtuosic Romantic original works for the trumpet do exist.
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Johann Friedrich Fasch: Concerti & Ouverturen
The present recording by the Basle Chamber Orchestra contains some of Fasch's most brilliant and sumptuous works, including a concerto for violin, three trumpets and orchestra, to orchestral suites and the virtuosic D-major trumpet concerto, performed on the valveless baroque trumpet by Giuliano Sommerhalder.
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