A View from Below

A bass player remembers the Trombone Concerto by Michael Brooks.

By Michael Lasserson

I first heard the concerto several years ago, when Michael Brooks and I were playing in the same amateur orchestra; it was included in one of our concert programmes, and so - as was the case with everything we played - was crammed into the weekly two-hour rehearsal. We learned it in bits and pieces, as we did the Beethoven and Brahms in the programme and, by the eighth week and the final rehearsal, we were beginning to understand and to like it as we became used to its sonorities and its deceptively difficult time signatures.

Then came the European Doctors' Orchestra, an organisation which brings as many as one hundred medically qualified musicians from all over Europe together twice a year for an exceptionally intense weekend of rehearsals and performance of a full symphonic programme. Last November, it included the Trombone Concerto - and we were particularly fortunate to have as our soloist the Philharmonia's principal trombonist, Byron Fulcher. He brought an awesome power of tone and technique to the work, while endearing himself to all of us by his unassuming charm and dignity.

The arduous task of conducting the orchestra during this weekend was ably performed by Rupert Bond who has endeared himself to the orchestra with his musical abilities, his enthusiasm for teaching and his sense of humour. Rupert had spent some time with Michael assisting with the structure and orchestration of the work.

We had, therefore, two-and-a-half days to work on our programme and this intensity of work meant that we could really get to know the concerto, including its history and dedication, and to understand the symbolism of its sound world as it portrayed the life problems of its dedicatee, the composer's father.

The concerto has an almost stately and processional quality about it which permeates the entire work, yet the three movements are very different - with the anguish of attempted communication portrayed in the second movement and the fugato passages in the third. The cantabile passages have their own austere beauty and the orchestral scoring is deft and intriguing - and demanding, not least because of the frequent time changes (which are always relevant rather than merely exhibitions of compositional technique), and the manner in which the soloist is thus supported underlines the composer's sympathy with - and understanding of - soloist and instrument, as befits his own experience as a trombonist.

The orchestra's programme included Beethoven and Sibelius, music which has been part of its members' musical awareness - music, at the core of the symphonic repertoire, with which all of us have grown up. The Trombone Concerto was for most of the players a new experience, in a new musical language, and such is its power that the orchestra embraced it, working on it with a devoted affection that was immediately evident in a performance which, we felt, did justice to it.

The Trombone Concerto has been published by Warwick Music.

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