Andrew McCandless, Trumpet

Bramwell and I after the world premiere of his new concerto.

Two weeks ago I premiered a new trumpet concerto, Songs of the Paradise Saloon, written by Bramwell Tovey, Music Director of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. We performed it with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in Roy Thomson Hall conducted by Maestro Tovey. This is the reason for my lack of blog writing over the past few weeks. At the end of this blog I will post some links to interviews that Bramwell and I did during the week if you are interested in learning a little more about the piece.

What I’m going to write about this week is how I went about learning this new concerto. It was a long process that started in early September and continued all the way up to the week of the performance.

Let me tell you a little about the piece from a trumpet point of view so you can understand what I was dealing with. First of all it was originally written for four different trumpets. The instruments were C trumpet, flugelhorn, Bb cornet and Bb piccolo trumpet. This eventually expanded to six trumpets when we added D trumpet and C cornet. These two were added for sound, style and key reasons. So now I have a concerto that involves six trumpets and four different mouthpieces. The mouthpieces were a Bach 1 ½ C trumpet mouth piece, and 3B Dennis Wick cornet mouth piece, a Bach 7D cornet mouthpiece for piccolo, and a Bach 1 ½ C flugelhorn mouthpiece. I knew going in that I would need to spend a lot of time making sure that I was comfortable on all of these instruments, and that I was comfortable switching back and forth very quickly. I also needed to make sure that I was really dialed in on the pitch. To work on this I would take some of the short solos in the back of the Arban book and play on each instrument back to back with a tuner. I was trying to get comfortable away from the concerto. I knew that the concerto would be difficult and I didn’t want to work out the pitch and comfort level during the learning process. I do this a lot with rotary trumpet also.

In early September I started to get parts of the concerto. The first part to arrive was the beginning and the end. I think I counted about six high concert D’s a high Eb and a high E all on C trumpet. To say the least I was a little alarmed. I would have liked to see the look on my face when I first saw these parts. I’m sure it was priceless!

I knew that I was going to have to work on extending my playing a lot, especially my high register and endurance. As it turned out the concerto was around twenty five minutes long! Ouch! It covered a range from pedal C to high concert F. There was multiple tonguing, lip trills, long lyrical passages, huge intervals and just about anything else you can think of. I had my work cut out for me.

The music came in bits and pieces over the course of a few months. I finally received a complete part about three weeks before the first rehearsal. The biggest thing I had to accomplish was to stay calm, work slow and steady, one page at a time. I knew that if I stayed patient I would get there. It was just a matter of perseverance. I find with most things that patience is the key. If I can just manage to take my time and start things soon enough things will work out in the end.

I couldn’t possibly finish writing this without saying thank you to Bramwell Tovey. This was the experience of a lifetime. Every part of it was fun. The piece is really terrific, the composer was fun to work with and the orchestra played great! It was a blast!

Below are the links to a few interviews. I would love to post sound clips, but I’m not allowed to under the TSO’s recording policy. There are some small clips during the interviews. I hope that you enjoy the interviews and the blog. As always if you have any questions or comments please let me know.

Andrew

Bravo! News
(The portion of the interview that talks about the Tovey concerto starts at about the 3:50 if you are interested in fast forwarding.)

Zoomer Radio AM740, David Bale with Bramwell Tovey