This 1990 recording was a Grammy winner and a consistent audience pleaser, which isn't a surprise: the combination of Telarc's snappy digital sound with the triumphant, all's-right-with-the-world mood of the Baroque and Classical trumpet concerto was a winning one. Smedvig is one of the world's great virtuosi on the trumpet, with a smooth sound that seems to be almost effortless but of course is not -- the earlier works here, written for a valveless trumpet, require the player to jump around in the trumpet's top register, ...
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This 1990 recording was a Grammy winner and a consistent audience pleaser, which isn't a surprise: the combination of Telarc's snappy digital sound with the triumphant, all's-right-with-the-world mood of the Baroque and Classical trumpet concerto was a winning one. Smedvig is one of the world's great virtuosi on the trumpet, with a smooth sound that seems to be almost effortless but of course is not -- the earlier works here, written for a valveless trumpet, require the player to jump around in the trumpet's top register, which was the only portion of the instrument's range that could produce a passable scale at the time. In fact, the concertos by Torelli and Tartini come off as just a bit too smooth in these performances; the charm of the galant Tartini work, which doesn't sound much like the composer's well-known violin piece The Devil's Trill, lies in its combination of what should be a very piercing trumpet line with the graceful pleasantries of the orchestral parts. On the more spacious concertos...
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