Rainer Saville, the QSO’s new Section Principal Trumpet, shares what he’s learned about this most mercurial of instruments.

Paul Goodchild retires from the Sydney Symphony Orchestra after 41 years.

The trumpet – glorious and war-like – isn’t an instrument you can be shy about, says Swedish trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger. But it’s the combination of power and vulnerability that makes it special.

Alex Galland did double duty on Saturday when he played the national anthem before a football game he played in. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Tom Scharfeld has seen off a challenge by the President’s legal team to naming his trumpet-teaching app, iTrump. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

See what happened when a flugelhorn and trumpet player began playing Star Wars outside the composer’s house.

Trumpet-playing driver gets in trouble on Melbourne’s West Gate Bridge. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The Bach family seems set on becoming as inescapable as the Kardashian fungibles. Once again, music by all sorts of profoundly obscure Bachs, as well as by JSB, Carl Philipp Emmanuel, Wilhelm Friedemann, and Johann Christian, has been covered. And yes, we behold here a piano in all its tonal glory, not a harpsichord, let alone a clavichord. The trumpet-piano combination has seldom generated original music (among front-ranking composers only Hindemith employed it, and even he struggled to make it interesting). Still, in these arrangements, carried out by pianist Daniel-Ben Pienaar from a bewildering variety of organ, chamber, and orchestral originals – even the theatre is acknowledged, an overture from JC Bach’s 1779 opera Amadis of Gaul having been included – it works like the proverbial charm. Jonathan Freeman-Attwood is a real find. His trumpet timbre resembles the late Maurice André: intrinsically straightforward but with judicious vibrato for emotive purposes, and with boundless panache. The pianism of his colleague avoids both undue pedalling and tiresomely excessive staccato. On occasion fast speeds impair chorale- preludes’ contrapuntal lucidity; yet overall, jaded sensibilities will consider this production a very agreeable tonic. Both performers benefit from remarkably vivid, well-balanced sound. May we have a…

When any classical musician wears milliondollar jewels and designer micro-dresses to industry events, is dubbed by Fleet Street as the “Trumpet Crumpet”, and sends the tabloids into a frenzy when she breaks up with her boyfriend, you could be forgiven for assuming that she’s just a rubbish player trading on her good looks. But from the moment Alison Balsom enters on Sound the Trumpet, her fifth album since the career-defining Caprice of 2006, all cynicism and doubts are cast aside. Playing natural (valveless) trumpets, the 34-year-old multi- Classical Brit award-winner is in rare form and this follow-up to last year’s Seraph, which featured scary contemporary concerto repertoire, contains ceremonial music by Britain’s two greatest early masters in the form. With an inspired English Concert, reunited on disc with their founder Trevor Pinnock for the first time since 2002 and captured vibrantly within the album’s rich sound palette, Balsom’s trumpet at first seems strangely subdued by comparison. But it soon becomes clear that it’s the less flashy tone of the period-instrument itself – blending rather than dominating like its modern successor would – and also part of an overall strategy to keep the trumpetweaving in and out of the album fabric……

Recent years have seen a renaissance of interest in the solo trumpet with a good handful of players reaching out beyond the Haydn and Hummel to explore more challenging contemporary repertoire. Philippe Shartz ensured a limited market for his brave foray by including Birtwistle’s demanding Endless Parade on his excellent Chandos album, but here Alison Balsom plays a safer hand with equal success in a program of edgy yet approachable “modern” works. The appetiser and title work is James MacMillan’s Seraph, a piece dedicated to Balsom, which wittily misquotes the opening of the Haydn concerto before taking us on an involving neo-classical journey. The main course, however, is a pair of tangy, postwar works from either side of the iron curtain. The Arutiunian concerto with its attractive Armenian inflections has had several outings on CD and here proves as engaging as ever. The discovery for me was the 15-minute rhapsody by the German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann. Like Tippett in A Child Of Our Time, Zimmermann uses a spiritual, in this case Nobody Knows De Trouble I See as a metaphor for the need for racial understanding. It’s a beautiful work, as finely calculated as a Hopper painting and like……

Queensland’s biennial arts festival brings in the big brass. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

In this concertante piece, banjo and accordion serve as continuo instruments but with plenty of soloistic flourishes.