Trumpet Concerto (2022)
(night-sky-blue)

...Grime retains the Boston Symphony’s complement of trumpets, treating them often as a gang opposing the soloist, often in stark opposition. ...The strings more often than not carried a quieter tone, more lyrical, expressing the composer’s fundamental view of “a garden at night… I was thinking of transformation, and of things being unsettled.” The woodwinds, which had suggested the unsettling mood of the very open, carried that effect forward in mixed chord shot kaleidoscopically into the maelstrom.

Nocturnal in character, the work is full of unrest and darkness, but it also contains moments of unsurpassable beauty and luminosity. 

Grime has written a compelling and evocative work, one that plays artfully with the trumpet’s wide range of sonorities as grasped through the shifting scrim of orchestral sound. The music, which was in the composer’s words “inspired by the idea of a garden at night,” feels consistently fresh and inventive, the solo line in a state of perpetual transformation and, at its most compelling moments, seemingly expanded from within by bright washes of percussion. 

[The concerto's] salient feature is how taut the construction is, charging its energy from a small number of ideas, led by a motif of oscillating minor thirds.

This is an important new piece by Helen Grime.... It is music inspired by the night — a theme Grime has returned to more than once.... Photographs of the natural world after dark were her starting point, and the result is almost an anti-trumpet concerto: enigmatic, introspective and uncertain. She gradually draws the listener in, as motifs shape-shift, dancing between familiarity and unfamiliarity. Orchestral colours coalesce around the soloist Håkan Hardenberger, who played with silky eloquence. As if waking from an unsettled dream, I found its mood lingered after the final note.