Review

Celebrated trumpet virtuoso and conductor Gerard Schwarz revisits his roots in this release – a 1971 New York concert with collaborative pianist Kun Woo Paik. Schwarz has woven together an attractive series of works and explained in excellent program notes the interrelated developments of trumpet performance, composition, and manufacture in 19th- and 20th-century France. A limitation is the disc’s length of only 42 minutes.

The recording opens with Arthur Honegger’s Intrada, a staple of the trumpet repertoire in which Schwarz demonstrates excellent tone and technique. George Enescu’s Légende is the disc’s highlight for me. Well-known as a virtuoso violinist, Enescu remains underrated in composition, which he studied with Fauré and Massenet in Paris. The work’s originality shows in an atmospheric and meditative opening, soft trumpet filigree passages, and a complex yet effective piano part. Eugène Bozza’s Caprice is idiomatic to the instrument, as is always the case with this prolific composer. Schwarz is more than equal to sprightly technical passages including challenging triple tonguing, but the duo also capture mysterious Debussy-like flavours elsewhere in the piece, including muted and echoed fanfares. Brief pieces represent other well-known 20th-century French composers: Jacques Ibert (Impromptu) and André Jolivet (Air de Bravoure). The two earlier works on the disc are Theo Charlier’s Solo de Concours and Henri Senée’s Concertino; I particularly like Senée’s composition for the cornet, especially the Romance movement, whose attractive melody is capped with a sudden pianissimo climax that Schwarz achieves impeccably.