Alison Balsom is a skilled, experienced, technically accomplished trumpeter. Her tuning throughout this programme, recorded live, is immaculate. Her flexibility and control is admirable. She shapes phrases with taste. The chosen programme is as varied as the ‘standard trumpet-piano repertoire’ allows. This album is sure to be a hit with Balsom’s large, predominantly English, fan base.

And yet, something is missing. Despite allowing her pianist a moment in the spotlight, for a shapeless performance of a movement from Ravel’s Sonatine, this album is a star vehicle. Tom Poster’s piano is relegated to the background, leaving the trumpet hanging, exposed, more obviously revealing the lack of expressive or emotional range in Balsom’s one-note playing. Her programme has stylistic range, from Hindemith’s square-jawed songfulness to Françaix’s quick-witted playfulness, Enescu’s long-breathed lyricism to Maxwell-Davies’ glorious sentimentality. But Balsom gives each piece strikingly similar treatment. Again and again the same note-attack, tone colour and phrase shapes, the same late-breaking, shuddery vibrato. When she takes tiny, welcome expressive risks in her final encore, Jerome Kern’s The way you look tonight, it’s clear what has been missing: any sense of the specialness, spontaneity or danger of live performance.

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