Balsom and the Britten Sinfonia regrouped at the Barbican’s Milton Court concert hall in September 2021 to reprise Sketches of Spain. They also placed Copland’s Quiet City in company with Simon Wright’s anything-but-quiet arrangement of the original jazz band version of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Warner Classics recorded the concert live and convened subsequent sessions to catch Ives’ The Unanswered Question, the Lonely Town “Pas de deux” from Bernstein’s On the Town and another Gil Evans gem, “My Ship” from Kurt Weill’s 1941 Broadway musical, Lady in the Dark. License for institutional access: The International Journal of Music does not issue or require the agreement of a formal license for institutional access to its content. Instead, it has chosen to adopt a cooperative and collaborative approach as exemplified by the SERU (Shared E-Resource Understanding) approach to e-resource subscriptions. This approach recognizes that the provision of timely, high-quality materials and their protection is in the mutual interests of all parties and offers savings in time and cost by enabling access within a framework of shared understanding and good faith. The album will also feature Balsom’s newly edited version of Bernstein’s Lonely Town from his 1944 musical On the Town, depicting a visitor’s bewilderment and loneliness despite being in the crowds of New York City. This is followed by Ives’ extraordinary, ethereal and pioneering 1908 work The Unanswered Question for solo trumpet, flute quartet and strings, asking the “Eternal question of existence”.

The arrangement feels so natural. Did you have some input on what trumpet lines you’d like to combine? It reminds me of the thing we all talk about as musicians; we instinctively know how important music is in one’s life. You don’t have to become a professional musician for music to be really important and make life worth living. I don’t think, as humans, we fully understand the benefits of music. We know that there are so many benefits of music, but we don’t fully understand how to apply all of those benefits to the rest of our lives yet. Some of us do, but it’s certainly not part of any government policy! And yet we know it’s a fact. One thing that keeps returning to my mind is that music is like a concept that takes over one’s language when words have run out; when we don’t have any other way of expressing ourselves. Music is almost the next highest step onwards. And I think this is what this piece means to me, more than any other. Music is as good a way as any to explain the universe, and I think this piece is a brilliant encapsulation of that. Bernstein: On the Town – Lonely Town. Pas de deux; Copland: Quiet City; Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (arr. Wright); Ives: The Unanswered Question; Rodrigo: Concierto de Aranjuez (arr. G Evans); Weill: My Ship (arr. G Evans) I don’t think of the Bernstein as an arrangement, really. It has a hauntingly beautiful melody with a little trumpet solo at the beginning, but it also has a cor anglais solo. And I thought that the cor anglais solo would work on the trumpet, so I basically just edited it and put the cor anglais bit on the trumpet as well. It wasn’t really that much of a change; the orchestra stayed the same.So that’s the only thing that doesn’t quite come home for me in this collection. Copland’s Quiet City– most beautifully realised by Balsom, Nicholas Daniel (cor anglais) and the Britten Sinfonia – is a magic casement opening on to a dreamy nocturnal world of deserted streets and Edward Hopperesque bars and, as it happens, a close cousin of Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question, which behaves like the philosophical subtext of Copland’s piece. In the Pas de deux ‘Lonely Town’ from Leonard Bernstein’s first Broadway musical On the Town, loneliness begets rapture and Balsom’s own arrangement really hits the spot. Alison Balsom’s new album Quiet City will be released worldwide on Warner Classics on 26 August 2022 But perhaps most poignantly for Alison Balsom, Aaron Copland's Quiet City is a work that she has cherished since she was a young woman. Balsom tells Russell how when she first heard this work at the age of 17, it completely changed her life. The album Quiet City explores American music of the20th century, composed in the era of the explosion of jazz. The sound of the solo trumpet inclassical and jazz music at this time was contrasting in style, and yet often evocative, plaintive and haunting, and so iconic to the aural landscape of America.Fascinated by the meeting point of these two styles at this time between both composers and performers, Balsom looks to share her deep love for this particular character of the instrument that defies genres. The twin centrepieces of this album are Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and the Adagio from Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez – both firmly established in the canon of classical hits, and both ripe for revisiting and reworking. Simon Wright’s trumpet-centric arrangement of the Rhapsody occupies something of a middle ground between the lushness of the widely-performed orchestral version and the punch of the original for jazz band. Balsom’s delicious rendition of the opening glissando assuages any initial doubts about the wisdom of the arrangement; her effortless, unforced high notes soon make their presence felt, and the sharing of the material between her and pianist Tom Poster in what has effectively become a double concerto feels as natural as if it had always been that way.

You just signed a five-album deal with Warner. The first one, Quiet City, explores American music from the 20th century and will be released on August 26th. You recorded Copland’s Quiet City, a newly edited version of Bernstein’s Lonely Town from On the Town, Ives’s Unanswered Question, a brand-new orchestral arrangement from Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and two works by the iconic Miles Davis/Gil Evans partnership, Concierto de Aranjuez and My Ship. Few pieces are more quintessentially American than Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and Simon Wright’s inventive arrangement for Balsom naturally foregrounds the trumpet. There is still a significant role for the piano, despatched with élan by Tom Poster, though the instrument points to why this version of the Rhapsody is ultimately unconvincing. Despite her romping, virtuosic bravura, Balsom’s wings are clipped by constant pianistic reminders of what the trumpet cannot do. Lastly, I want to give a big shout-out to the trumpet section, who are experts in a lot of this music and have really thought about it all their lives. They played so incredibly, and they really inspired me on the sessions.But one of the other reasons that album came about was because I was invited to play at the Barbican in London a few years ago with the Britten Sinfonia, and they asked me to play the Concierto de Aranjuez, Miles Davies and Gil Evans’ version of Rodrigo’s Sketches of Spain. I wasn’t sure if I was the right person for it, being a classical trumpet player, and I didn’t know if it would sound right with an orchestra. But in fact, it turned out that the Britten Sinfonia are a very flexible ensemble and not really defined by genre. They have some of the best non-classical musicians in London who also play in bands, who play classical, jazz and many other styles. When I went and participated in this concert, I was mesmerised by their playing. It didn’t sound pastiche or like a copy of Gil Evans’ recording — it sounded really like what Gil Evans would have wanted. It really had that sound, rather than a classical version of that sound. So I was very inspired by that.