DAVID MELLOR
Alison Balsom Quiet City Warner Classics, out now ★★★★★
Alison Balsom: Quiet City, the sleeve intones, against the background of a charming photo of the brass player. No surprises there. Aaron Copland’s Quiet City has long been a favourite of Balsom’s. Described by Copland himself as ‘a realistic fantasy concerning the night thoughts of many different kinds of people in a great city’, it’s an eloquent nocturne as good as anything of this kind produced in the 20th Century.
Here, Balsom (below) is well partnered by the cor anglais player Nicholas Daniel, and the Britten Sinfonia under Scott Stroman.
But looking further down the list of contents, the surprises arrive thick and fast. Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto De Aranjuez? What’s that doing here? And the Rhapsody In Blue: some mistake, surely?
I hastened to listen, and was soon engrossed in one of the most fascinating recordings Balsom has ever made.
The Rodrigo turns out to be an arrangement for the celebrated American trumpeter Miles
Davis, by the almost equally talented Canadian jazz pianist Gil Evans.
Their reflections on Rodrigo take us, to be sure, a long way from the original. But what is offered is plainly done as a real act of homage to easily the most celebrated guitar concerto ever written. Davis’s own reflections, originally extemporaneous, have been carefully transcribed by
Balsom for this recording, and they take us into an entirely different world of imagination.
Almost equally compelling is a little encore: the same musicians’ arrangement of Kurt Weill’s
My Ship.
Rhapsody In Blue is something very different again. Balsom takes up the story: ‘I asked the arranger, Simon Wright, to create a totally new orchestration for Rhapsody In Blue – going right back to the two-piano original Gershwin had written for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra’s arranger, Ferde Grofé, but with lines added or interwoven from both of the two piano parts to create a trumpet line.’
I don’t say this is the way I shall want to hear Rhapsody In Blue all the time. It’s a totally magical piece in its original version. But every now and again this one represents a fascinating challenge to the listener, as well as to the players.
Stir into this heady mix Balsom’s own arrangement of
Leonard Bernstein’s Lonely Town Pas De Deux and Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question, played straight, and you have an album which will be, for me, a regular companion when I want to put my feet up and listen to something both unusual and special.