Ian Bousfield moved to the Vienna Philharmonic in 2000, but next year he’ll return to the London Symphony Orchestra for one evening to perform a new trombone concerto written for him by Jonathan Dove.

The piece has been called Stargazer and will be conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas on 9th March 2007 at the Barbican in a programme including Mahler’s 4th Symphony. Tickets are available now at the LSO website.

Trombonist Nick Hudson is to perform Gustav Holst’s recently rediscovered solo trombone work. Nick has been invited to perform the Concertante with the Taunton Concert Band in April. Says Nick:

I’ve performed the piece a number of times in Spain and the States but it seems the work is rarely heard here in the UK. It was originally composed for trombone and organ and was transcribed for wind band by Stephen Roberts. It’s quite a challenge, not for stretching the technical abilities of the trombone but for interpretation, and stamina! It’s also nice to be given the chance to perform British repertoire on British soil for a change.

Nick will also be featuring Monti’s Czardas which will take place at the Taachi-Morris Arts Centre in Taunton on 1 April 2006.

The Trombone by Dr Trevor Herbert, Staff Tutor and Senior Lecturer in Music at the Open University in Wales, is published in March 2006 by Yale University Press. Already received with critical acclaim, this book deserves a place on every trombonist’s bookshelf. The synopsis states:

This is the first fully comprehensive study of the trombone in English. It covers the instrument, its repertoire, the way it has been played, and the social, cultural and aesthetic contexts within which it has developed. It explores the origins of the instrument, its invention in the fifteenth century, and its story up to modern times. And it reveals the hidden histories of the trombone and its players in different periods and different countries. The book looks not only at the trombone within classical music, but at its place in jazz, popular music, popular religion and light music. Herbert examines the development of written repertoires in the sixteenth century, the ‘golden age’ of the instrument in the seventeenth century, its descent into obscurity in the eighteenth century and its re-emergence in the expanded symphony and opera orchestras and military bands of the Romantic era. The popular music explosion of the nineteenth century brought amateur players and showmen soloists. The impact of jazz was fundamental to the trombone, providing an alternative to the conservatoire tradition. By the late twentieth century its techniques had filtered into the performance idioms of almost all styles of music and transformed ideas about virtuosity and lyricism in trombone playing.

The book was featured on the BBC’s Music Matters programme, broadcast on Sunday 19 February 2006. In case you missed it, the programme featured interviews with Dr Herbert, members of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama trombone ensemble, as well as soloist Christian Lindberg, jazz trombonist Annie Whitehead and newscaster trombonist John Suchet and you can listen to the programme online until 5 March.

BBC presenter Petroc Trelawny:

The trombone is often a neglected instrument … perhaps all too often seen as lacking the cool chic of some of its colleagues elsewhere in the orchestra.

John Suchet:

What a sound!

Annie Whitehead:

It was the sound that attracted me.

Dr Trevor Herbert:

The trombone was one of the most used and certainly one of the most highly regarded of instruments that was used in the 16th century and the early part of the 17th century. Towards the end of the 17th century there’s lots of evidence that it was falling out of fashion; lots of evidence that instruments were lying around in boxes broken and lots of evidence that players were put out of work.

It started being regarded as an instrument used only by the waits as sort of loud, boisterous instruments in civic bands.

It had a very bad reputation. It was not something that really had a tradition behind it, and so you find an enormous amount of the playing of trombone players in sections who were regarded as too loud, too brassy. The famous trombone solo in the Tuba Mirum in Mozart’s Requiem, for example, was regarded by many critics in the 19th century as a mistake on the part of Mozart. Very often that particular solo was played on a bassoon rather than a trombone, because it was not credited that a trombone player could play it.

In the 19th century, the military was custodian of by far the highest standards of brass playing of all types, so players, even though they were still criticised for being too loud, were able to play as a section of trombone players in a way that we hear them today.

The Pangaea Trombone Quartet is formed from students at the Royal Academy of Music and is performing a lunchtime recital in Regent Hall, London on Friday 24 February 2006.
The program will include music by Brahms, Debussy, Albrechtsberger, Kazik and Thelonious Monk.

The quartet consists of Blair Sinclair, William Hall and Iain Maxwell on tenor trombones and Dan West on bass trombone.

Pangaea Trombone Quartet

Regent Hall, 275 Oxford Street, London W1
Friday, 24 February 2006, 1pm-2pm