Trumpet Concerto

Trumpet Concerto

Joseph Haydn

Spring is here, and vitality is back! With this pick for Music of the Week, the emergent energies that this wonderful season of the year provides become palpable and audible.

What is so interesting about Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto in E-flat major is that it is the first composition for a trumpet that could play the full chromatic scale. Until the invention of the “keyed trumpet,” these instruments had no valves or keys and were only able to produce the notes of the harmonic series. Very talented players, using special “lipping” techniques, were able to produce additional tones, but it was only with the newly developed keyed trumpet that notes from different registers came into reach.

Incidentally, historians found the idea of the keyed trumpet in Leonardo da Vinci’s 15th-century notebooks, just one of the many genial ideas that Leonardo himself didn’t have the time to realize.

Today’s trumpets, by the way, use valves, not keys, and are a further development from the innovations in the 18th century.

Haydn was fascinated by the new instrument and the range of notes it produced. He wrote this concerto for Anton Weidinger, a contemporary trumpet virtuoso who was crucial in the development of the new brass instrument.

In this recording, we are hearing one of the most talented trumpet players of our time, Alison Balsom, playing with the BBC Symphony Orchestra on the Last Night of the Proms in 2009.