Today, a concerto: specifically, a trumpet concerto. This one was written by the great film composer John Williams, who has somehow over his incredibly busy years of scoring many films and maintaining a hectic conducting schedule managed to find time to compose concert works as well. The man is amazing. He just is!
This concerto is a strikingly dramatic work in a modernistic vein, and as is often the case with Williams’s concert works, the piece doesn’t have the ear-catching melodies that are almost always present in his film scores. This is not a criticism. In his concert music, Williams tends to let melody be more of an emergent thing than an obvious one; there is usually an improvisatory air to his concert music, which may spring from his days as a jazz pianist and a session musician before he fully transitioned to the life of a composer.
From the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s site:
Williams’s Trumpet Concerto was written in 1996 for The Cleveland Orchestra and its principal trumpet, Michael Sachs. The work was premiered by Sachs and The Cleveland Orchestra on September 26, 1996, under the direction of then-Music Director Christoph von Dohnanyi. The debut of this significant addition to the trumpet repertoire garnered praise from the local press, with Donald Rosenberg of the Cleveland Plain Dealer noting the concerto’s “dignified personality, soloistic variety and orchestral color.”
Here is the Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra by John Williams. No Haydn concerto this, with a calm classical intro! The soloist is the first thing you hear, in starkly dramatic fashion.
