CHICAGO, ILLINOIS (MAY 17, 2024) — In furtherance of her mission to establish a robust, contemporary repertoire for the trumpet, soloist Mary Elizabeth Bowden devotes her first album with full orchestra to world-premiere recordings of concertos by six living composers. Titled Storyteller: Contemporary Concertos for Trumpet, this Cedille Records release features three concertos specially commissioned for this project — by Clarice V. Assad, Tyson Gholston Davis, and Vivian Fung — as well as newly commissioned concerto arrangements by Reena Esmail, Sarah Kirkland Snider, and James M. Stephenson. Ms. Bowden performs these works with the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra, led by Music Director Allen Tinkham. Storyteller: Contemporary Concertos for Trumpet is available Friday, June 14. The recording is Ms. Bowden’s first with Cedille Records.
The album opens with its title track, The Storyteller (2013) by Chicago-based composer James M. Stephenson. Originally composed for trumpet, violin, piano, and offstage trumpet, the work is a tribute to the late Adolph “Bud” Herseth, who was Principal Trumpet of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for more than 50 years and whose performances were a formative musical influence on the composer. Herseth’s playing has been described as telling a story with every note, so Mr. Stephenson endeavored to tell the trumpeter’s story in this piece, including through allusions to works that the composer had heard Herseth play with particular aplomb. Mr. Stephenson’s 2018 companion piece for The Storyteller, titled Scram!, has also been cast in a new orchestral concerto arrangement for the present album.
Composed for Ms. Bowden and premiered by her with the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra, Clarice Assad’s Bohemian Queen (2022) is inspired by the surrealist art of Chicago-based American painter Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–1977). The first two movements, titled Girl Searching and The Stroll, respectively, are inspired by Abercrombie’s 1945 and 1943 paintings of the same names. The artist was friends with many jazz luminaries, and the third and final movement, Hyde Park Jam, evokes their frequent music-filled parties, in which Gertrude often joined in at the piano. Hyde Park Jam is available now as a single.
Tyson Gholston Davis’s Veiled Light (2021) also tackles a painterly subject, in this case James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Red (c. 1884). The concerto is written for two trumpet soloists with strings, as the composer uses these forces to channel the “murky and ambiguous atmosphere” he identifies in the painting. The first movement, for example, captures the eerily still reflections of buildings in a canal through slowly evolving harmonies paired with a descending line in the trumpets that drives the musical flow. The composer wrote the work in part for Ms. Bowden, and she performed in the premiere with The Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle in Durham, NC.
The inspiration for Vivian Fung’s Trumpet Concerto (2019) was Ms. Bowden herself, particularly her quest to build a solo career in a male-dominated field. The work’s expressive arc parallels her emotional journey along that path, marked by feelings of frustration, passion, struggle, and ultimately a sense of celebration. This one-movement concerto also seeks to explore the musical possibilities of both E-flat trumpet and flugelhorn. Ms. Bowden premiered the work with lead commissioner the Erie Philharmonic.
The remaining two world premieres on this album are new instrumental, concertante arrangements of works that originated as songs in a more intimate chamber setting. Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Caritas (2021) began as a song inspired by the texts of 12th-century composer, visionary, and polymath Hildegard von Bingen. Ms. Snider explains: “I created a poem of sorts based on various Hildegard texts about the Biblical virtue ‘Caritas,’ or Charity, to whom she often prayed. For Hildegard, Caritas embodied the Female Divine.” The original setting for mezzo-soprano, string quartet, and harp has been adapted here for flugelhorn, string orchestra, and harp.
Reena Esmail’s Rosa de Sal (2020) was initially composed as a song for soprano-and-piano with Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet XVII as the text. Opening with the line “No te amo como si fueras rosa de sal” (I do not love you as if you were rose of salt), the poem goes on to present a complex vision of love and desire that Ms. Esmail connects musically to the Hindustani raag Puriya Dhanashree, in which she hears the same sensibility. Unlike Snider’s straightforward transcription, Esmail’s piece is a full reimagining of her original song.
Storyteller: Contemporary Concertos for Trumpet is Ms. Bowden’s third solo album. It was preceded by two releases on Summit Records: her 2015 debut album, Radiance (featuring new American works), and her second solo recording, Rêverie (2019), with the Kassia Ensemble. Rêverie was featured among the Global Music Awards’ Top Albums of the Year, Textura Magazine’s Top Ten Classical Albums of the Year, and nominated for an Opus Klassik Award. With her chamber ensemble, Seraph Brass, Ms. Bowden is currently recording an album of new compositions for brass quintet for Tower Grove Records.
|