Page 50 - Alison Balsom Quiet City FULL BOOK
P. 50
We never knew if it was actually going to work as a finished product,
but we knew for a fact that it was going to be a lot of fun trying. So
that’s what we did — we threw everything at it and played with as
much conviction as possible. We hope people will really like it. It does
make us smile as it’s quite a cartoonish piece in some ways, but it’s
got many beautiful moments written by Gershwin, of course, and it’s
just a privilege as a trumpeter to get my teeth into some of those
melodies that weren’t previously available to us.
The arrangement feels so natural. Did you have some input on what
trumpet lines you’d like to combine?
I did all the trumpet lines, and very early on, I just took the score and
figured out what could work on the trumpet: how would that affect
everybody else? Was it justifiable? I would say to Simon what I
wanted to play, and then Tom and I would bash through it, just
trumpet and piano. We wanted to see what felt right or what might
have needed to be changed. We would then go and tell Simon, who
would put it all on the computer and make it all coherent, then send it
back, and we would keep playing over what we felt was the most
natural. If it had been for another trumpeter, it might have been
completely different, but with me, these were the things I felt that I
needed to do with the trumpet to make it feel natural and work
musically. It was really organic. We actually did two performances, the
second of which was recorded for the album. The first was a few days
before, and we still hadn’t got the part anywhere near what it now
sounds like on the recording! We were still experimenting with things
in the first concert! It was very exciting in that regard.
The Ives is also an original work. Amazingly, it’s the earliest on the
disc and feels, in a way, as the most pioneering and the most modern.
He wrote it in 1908, which was very early for music like this. It’s really
existential and thought-provoking. It’s also really musically complex
