Page 61 - Alison Balsom Quiet City FULL BOOK

but it also has a cor anglais solo. And I thought that the cor anglais
solo would work on the trumpet, so I basically just edited it and put the

cor anglais bit on the trumpet as well. It wasn’t really that much of a

change; the orchestra stayed the same.

After that is the Gershwin. It was the biggest technical challenge on

the disc because I realised that the copyright on the original Gershwin

was up in 2020, so whilst this sounded really fortunate, of course, the

orchestral version was not out of copyright! We had to redo the
orchestration entirely! I approached an amazing arranger friend of

mine, Simon Wright, with whom I’ve worked a lot in the past. I thought

I was asking to do one thing, which was to add a trumpet part: I
wanted to keep the piano because it was an iconic, wonderfully

written part, but I also wanted to insert trumpet work into that as well

and make it a dialogue between piano and trumpet, with orchestra.
But it turned out that the whole thing had to be rewritten. It was a huge

time commitment for Simon, for which I am grateful. But it was also an

opportunity to speak to Tom Poster, the pianist and my great

collaborator who has played the piece brilliantly many times in the
form we all know. It was really constructive to ask him, “Are there any

moments in this piece where you think, actually, could they be a little

different?” Although we haven’t veered too far away from what people

know, there are some changes that we really enjoyed when we
performed and recorded it. Whilst sitting in my living room, I called

both Simon and Tom (both of whom I’ve worked with for decades),

and remember very clearly saying that I had had this idea… At the
beginning of the conversation with both of them, they thought I was

absolutely bananas, and it was the silliest idea I’d ever had! I spent

fifteen, twenty minutes telling them what I was thinking and why, and
by the end of that, they said, “Oh, this actually might be fun — it might

work!” So I managed to talk them around.