Page 218 - Alison Balsom Quiet City FULL BOOK

Balsom is mesmerisingly plaintive in the Copland, matched by Nicholas Daniel’s
elegiac cor anglais. Balsom is equally adroit capturing the down-at-heel soulfulness
of Bernstein’s Lonely Town and the existential transcendence of Ives’s The
Unanswered Question.

Few pieces are more quintessentially American than Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue,
and Simon Wright’s inventive arrangement for Balsom naturally foregrounds the
trumpet. There is still a significant role for the piano, despatched with élan by Tom
Poster, though the instrument points to why this version of the Rhapsody is
ultimately unconvincing. Despite her romping, virtuosic bravura, Balsom’s wings are
clipped by constant pianistic reminders of what the trumpet cannot do.

This slight misfire aside, there is much to enjoy, not least the arrangements Gil
Evans made for Miles Davis of Kurt Weill’s My Shipand, more extensively,
Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. Written for Davis’s Sketches of Spain album, the
wonderfully sultry take on the Concierto was the starting point for Balsom’s project.
Revisiting the improvisatory practice of jazz icons with highly idiosyncratic
techniques can fall flat, but Balsom and the Britten Sinfonia make it work. They are
entirely idiomatic and wonderfully engaging, both here and in their other sketches of
America.

Christopher Dingle