An instrument is a tool with which we bring ideas to life. The trumpet awakens the sounds of our imagination. But we musicians are also instruments – instruments which help bring alive abstract experience of time and emotion.
New Music
In the last 40 years the solo literature for trumpet has experienced an explosion. In 2010 my Berlin Festival “Totally Trumpet” demostrated some facets of this explosion. New pieces were crucially inspired by the pioneering and passionate work of Håkan Hardenberger, Reinhold Friedrich and John Wallace, a work that was grabbed up and brought further by younger colleagues. (I don’t want to mention names for fear that I will leave out too many highly deserving artists. Exemplary players have can be heard in Australia, France, USA, Germany, Japan, etc.) Besides the masterpieces by Berio, Stockhausen and Zimmermann, which have become classics, I reccommend listening to works by Mark André, Rebecca Saunders, Olga Neuwirth, Helmut Oehring, Fabian Levy… (the list goes on forever when I begin to think about it).
Orchestral playing
At the begining of my carreer I had the opportunity to hold positions for ten years in opera, radio and symphony orchestras. After a long period, in which I mostly played in the Ensemble Modern and as a soloist, I played principal trumpet at the Deutsche Oper Berlin from 2014 until 2016, while the orchetra was searching for a new colleague next to the outstanding Martin Wagemann. This experience, playing the great works by R. Strauß, Wagner, Verdi, Schostakovich, etc. in a fantastic opera house, was not only inspirational for my last teaching years. It was a reminder of the professionalism and idealism, which many orchestra players bring to their daily changing and techniaclly and musically demanding work.
Baroque Music and the Natural Trumpet
The great trumpet playing of Maurice Andre, which trumpeters of my generation grew up, cast a long shadow. For many of us Andre’s trumpet playing and his aethetics influenced our understnading of baroque style so much, that it was difficult to find a contemporary, historically informed approach to this music. This problem lead mie to experiment with the natural trumpet, which turned out to offer a window into the essence of baroque music. The expressiveness of three natural trumpets in the music of Bach ist incomparably stronger than three piccolo trumpets, even if the latter are acoustically more powerful. The nearness to the human voice and the wide range of articulation of the natural trumpet give Arias by Bach, Händel, Scarlatti, etc an otherwise unequalled expressive quality. I’ve been performing with the natural trumpet for more than 20 years, having performed highlights like Bach’s B minor Mass, Händel’s Dettinger Te Deum and countless other works with leading ensembles in and around Berlin.
Details of coming performances can be found here.