“I grew up in a musical family, and my parents were musicians,” says Vladislav. “I was immersed in music, and literally from the first years I began to sing. At the age of five, my mother sat me at the piano, and my father gave me a trumpet when I was nine. And at twenty-nine, I began to conduct. From the days of my childhood, I loved to perform on stage, I sang songs with dad’s ensemble and performed as a pianist and then as a trumpeter and conductor.”
The album opens with the famous trumpet concerto by Joseph Haydn. He composed it in 1796, at the peak of his glory, after creating over a hundred symphonies, dozens of piano sonatas, quartets, and operas. It was Anton Weidinger (1767–1852), a Viennese musician, who designed a trumpet with wider technical capabilities. This new instrument inspired Haydn to write his concerto, which is of interest to contemporary trumpeters because modern valve instruments are capable of performing complex passages.
The same Anton Weidinger also “tempted” Johann Hummel, a fashionable Viennese pianist, to write a trumpet concerto in 1803. Lavrik finds Hummel’s work to be the most beautiful, especially its second movement: “It might be the one I have performed most frequently in my concerts. I remember very well my first appearance with this concerto at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory with the Bolshoi Symphony Orchestra. It was a special and unforgettable performance to me.”
While the names of the first two composers are widely familiar, the next two are only known among professionals, which does not detract from their merits and the quality of their music.
Johann Neruda composed his concerto for trumpet and string orchestra in E-flat major around 1740. It was originally written for the period natural horn, corno da caccia, an instrument that has long been out of everyday practice.
German composer Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel (1690–1749), a contemporary of J. S. Bach, initially wrote his concerto for oboe, strings and basso continuo. After the composer’s death, his scores remained in the archives of the Berlin State Library for two centuries and were published only in the middle of the 20th century, and even later, the famous French trumpeter Maurice André made a trumpet arrangement of the oboe concerto in 1972 and gave the work a new life.
Petr Pospelov, writing in “Musical Life”
– “Lavrik and the musicians of Tula play the music of classicism and baroque with ease, naturalness and transparency. On this recording Lavrik plays the trumpet in E flat, charmingly conveying the phrasing conceived by the composers, savoring syncopations, flooding with trills, easily running scales, jokingly overcoming leaps and, of course, enchanting with flowing legato. The major key reigns and triumphs all the more heartfelt is the sound of the minor middle section in the Hummel Concerto, which brings to mind Mozart’s best pages. The inserts devised by Lavrik also differ: whereas for Haydn he gave the expected stylized cadenza, for Neruda he composed something vividly theatrical and even avant-garde.”
Vladislav Lavrik and the Tula Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra
