Alison Balsom – Quiet City

“Even as a teenager, I fell in love with Copland’s ‘Quiet City,'” Alison Balsom recalls. The piece suggests the silence of a sleeping city. The sound of a lone clarinet emerges from it, then the notes of a trumpet flicker out. The British trumpeter now dedicates her album Quiet City to this work, which she has long loved.

On it, the explorative classical musician explores with her instrument a repertoire that is still quite new to her: the musical world of the United States in the early 20th century, when African influences merged with European classical and traditional folk music. A melting pot from which jazz and blues sprang. On the album, Alison Balsom combines six very different jazz compositions with each other, two masterpieces in themselves, Copland’s Quiet City and Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question, with four vibrant milestones of jazz music, including George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The Rhapsody’s yearningly blossoming signature motif, with which a clarinet opens the work, is interpreted by Alison Balsom on her trumpet. She also arranged Leonhard Bernstein’s On the Town for her instrument, while on other classics the musician draws on arrangements for jazz legend Miles Davis and his improvisations.

The world-class trumpeter was thrilled with her artistic partners, the Britten Sinfonia under Scott Stroman: “I knew it was a celebrated ensemble in the classical music scene – but the musicians amazed me with their flexibility and unbiased musicality!”

Revisiting the improvisatory practice of jazz icons with highly idiosyncratic techniques can fall flat, but Balsom and the Britten Sinfonia make it work. They are entirely idiomatic and wonderfully engaging, both here [the Rodrigo/Evans] and in their other sketches of America. — BBC Music Magazine, October 2022, 4 out of 5 stars