Page 323 - FINAL_Guildhall Media Highlights 2019-2020 Coverage Book
P. 323
10 November 2019
INTERVIEW
Why the trumpet soloist Alison Balsom is a blast of
fresh air
Balsom’s passion for the trumpet, music education and making baroque rock blows Dan Cairns away
Dan Cairns
The horn for Handel: Balsom’s latest celebrates the trumpet’s golden ageLIZZIE PATTERSON
Alison Balsom has a vivid turn of phrase when describing the instrument she has made her name playing.
The trumpeter is similarly unstuffy when she talks about her beloved baroque music. “I’d practise till my
lips were bleeding,” the 41-year-old says of her time at the Paris Conservatoire, where she studied after
graduating from Guildhall School of Music and Drama. “But it was all just a joy.”
Balsom’s discovery of the baroque repertoire was life-changing, she says. “These guys were living hundreds
of years ago, in very formal societies, yet their music… it just rocks.” When she first encountered
dissonance in the music of Henry Purcell, she remembers thinking: “Christ, this is like jazz.” And of the
limitations both in terms of repertoire and practicality a baroque trumpeter faces, she comments: “What I
would love to do is just perform with a lute player and play a long recital, but for all sorts of reasons that
would be impossible. The trumpet is too powerful, you can’t play anything of any harmonic intricacy, and
you certainly can’t play for two hours with just a lute — your face would fall off.”
As those remarks demonstrate, Balsom is a bracingly down-to-earth presence in a world not always noted
for its ability to sound up to date. She is also formidably busy, as a recording and touring artist and as a
commissioner and arranger of music. She was artistic director of this year’s Cheltenham Music Festival; she
is currently Milton Court artist in residence at the Barbican Centre, in London, curating projects including a
