Page 93 - Alison Balsom Quiet City FULL BOOK

Balsom’s idea to commission a new arrangement of Rhapsody in Blue from
Gershwin’s two-piano original (which had just fallen out of copyright, with Ferde

Grofé’s famous orchestration remaining in copyright for a while yet) and featuring a
new prominent trumpet part. She approached Simon Wright. ‘He is so brilliant, and

understands brass instruments so well.’ However, she recalls, ‘I think he thought I
was bonkers.’ Undeterred, she reassured him, ‘We’re not taking away the piano part,
we’re not trying to make it a work for trumpet and orchestra instead – the piano part

is still absolutely the centre of the whole thing.’ And so he set about orchestrating it
from scratch. The next initial sceptic to be convinced was her regular pianist partner

Tom Poster, who was likewise won round. ‘We met up quite early on to just busk
through it, to decide what we’d do and what we wouldn’t do. It was a really enjoyable

process,’ Balsom recalls. They were joined by the orchestra six weeks before the
recording, at which point, she remembers, ‘I wasn’t even doing that famous first run,

because “cl” was one of the very few marks Gershwin put in the piano part of the
score: that it should be played on the clarinet!’ The exact nature of the arrangement
remained in a state of flux right up until a concert two days before the recording. ‘It

was a really thrilling, seat-of-the-pants way of working, but that was the only way that
I could bring this piece together. It couldn’t be done on a computer in an academic

way, you had to do it like this: asking how does it feel live? How does it feel under
pressure with an audience? What are the peaks and troughs of the whole piece?
Where does the trumpet take the lead and the piano take over? What is the balance

of everyone’s conversational contributions? I’d never done anything like that before.’

‘I just thought, “I don’t care, I’m getting as close as possible to that

sound world that I’m imagining for this music”’

Going from one bold take on a huge hit to another, this time we have Evans’s

arrangement of the Adagio from Concierto de Aranjuez, from his and Miles Davis’s
1960 album ‘Sketches of Spain’. Like Rhapsody in Blue, it’s a work that takes us
back to the thrilling and disorientating whirlpool where classical and jazz swirl

together so spectacularly – though here perhaps the water spins in the opposite
direction. Reinterpreting a classical score is what musicians do; but returning to a

jazz composition immortalised in a legendary recording isn’t so often done. Balsom’s
desire to do so is rooted in total respect for the original, and a belief that its qualities