At some defining moment in history, the profile of a musical instrument can be changed irrevocably. A performer arrives whose playing does not merely distil current technical possibilities, but injects new blood into the veins of the instrument’s musical being. The solo trumpet has enjoyed intermittent and brief periods of notoriety during the 400 years of ‘modern’ music, but no classical performer has had a greater impact on its development than Maurice André, the French virtuoso born in Alès in 1933. While the early 20th century saw the raising of the trumpet’s profile through jazz, and in particular through Louis Armstrong, André brought sophistication and status to the instrument by elevating it to the high table of ‘serious’ concert music. He was the classical trumpet’s first big star. No longer confined to a world of ballads, competition pieces and variations on opera tunes, the solo trumpet in André’s hands became a vehicle for the musical taste, panache and technical flexibility usually associated with the greatest of classical pianists, violinists, cellists, oboists and flautists. His sound became instantly recognisable to audiences worldwide and is readily accessible through a vast discography of around 300 recordings.
André’s background, like that of so many brass players before and since, was a mining community: the British tradition of an on-site recreational brass band was not part of his Provençal upbringing. When he took up the trumpet as a 12-year-old, André was given a book of popular love songs by his father, an amateur player. It is perhaps not surprising that, with his musical sensibilities, André later embraced pieces in which, unabashed, he could indulge his passion for open-hearted vocalisation. His capacity for sustaining a smooth line, with seemingly unending supplies of breath and with multi-coloured shading, was built both on a formidable technique and also on his considerable physical frame. These explain his remarkable stamina (in concerts he would play concerto after concerto), and a tone compellingly focused and supremely controlled. His feathery attack and pulsating pianos are legendary. André claimed that his strength derived from years in the mines, but his cultivated sound undoubtedly emanated from the vocal characterisation of the experienced coloratura, a manner of playing he developed and perfected during his years in Paris, first as a student at the Conservatoire in the early 1950s and then as an orchestral player from 1953 until 1967.
No revolution for the trumpet could have been achieved without a pioneer’s effortless command of the high register, the sine qua non of successful solo trumpet playing, especially in the challenges offered by Bach in his oratorios and cantatas. Such was André’s security in this repertoire that in the early 1960s he was dominant in the major recordings of these works. The main source of his solo repertoire lay in a remodelling of this Baroque sound world: arrangements of sonatas, suites and concertos conceived for other instruments in which the scoring of the original was irrelevant. André trawled through the works of Albinoni, Vivaldi, Handel, Tartini and many lesser-known composers and brought to his discoveries those qualities that the ‘natural’ trumpet could not deliver: virtuoso passage-work and soaring melody in all registers and keys. In effect, he offered the trumpet a second chance: a reincarnation in the music of the Baroque, a language to which the instrument is so eminently suited.
The turning point in André’s career came at the 1963 Munich International Competition, where famously he became ‘gamekeeper turned poacher’. Invited as a jury member, André decided that he would prefer to enter the fray, and went on to win in decisive and spectacular fashion. Subsequently, he set out to establish his instrument, especially the relatively new piccolo trumpet, as a serious solo voice. Publications in his name are voluminous, with arrangements that urge the player to ever greater challenges, although it must be admitted that some of the pieces are all but unplayable by anyone but André himself.
To such a charismatic performer with such an impressive repertoire came not only new works (notably from Jolivet, Langlais and Tomasi) but also recognition by many eminent conductors, among them Karajan, Mackerras and Muti, who were able to introduce new and idiomatic trumpet concertos to audiences eager to hear them. Though André was essentially a musical conservative, his impact on audiences was truly radical; no other trumpeter had been recognised as a classical artist to set alongside the likes of Horowitz, Menuhin, Tortelier, Heinz Holliger, and André’s friend and compatriot Jean-Pierre Rampal.
Copyright EMI
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