Trumpet Concerto

Program notes

About the Work

Wynton Marsalis’s Trumpet Concerto is a major recent addition to the repertoire from a musician uniquely placed to write it, one of the supreme trumpeters of our age, equally at home in jazz and classical music. Written for the principal trumpet of the Cleveland Orchestra, Michael Sachs, and co-commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra, the Verbier Festival and the London Symphony Orchestra, it received its premiere in Cleveland in April 2023. It is a large, ambitious work (six movements, around thirty-five minutes) in which Marsalis pours his whole musical world into the classical concerto form: New Orleans jazz, the blues, bebop, Louis Armstrong and the French trumpet tradition all rub shoulders with symphonic development and virtuoso display.

The concerto is both a showcase for the soloist’s complete command of the instrument (its lyricism, agility, range and expressive colour) and a panorama of American music. Tonight the solo part is taken not by a visiting star but by the orchestra’s own principal trumpet, Miro Petkov, stepping forward from within the ensemble. It is a substantial, kaleidoscopic centrepiece for a programme celebrating the richness of the Black American musical tradition.

What to Listen For

This is a big, multi-movement journey, so settle in and follow its changing moods. Listen for the way Marsalis blends idioms: passages of bluesy, vocal lyricism (the trumpet ‘singing’ or ‘crying’ in the manner of a great jazz soloist) set against more formal, classically-developed orchestral writing; bright, swinging, syncopated music alongside reflective, soulful slow movements.

Keep your ear on the solo trumpet’s astonishing range of expression, from brilliant, high-flying virtuosity to muted, intimate, almost speech-like phrases, and the bent notes and growls of the jazz tradition. Marsalis asks the soloist to be both a classical virtuoso and a jazz storyteller. Listen, too, for echoes of New Orleans, of the blues and of Louis Armstrong woven into the symphonic fabric. It is a concerto that celebrates the trumpet in all its guises, and the deep common roots of America’s classical and vernacular music.