Kicking off the Improvisionaries season on October 1st, 2017 will be an exploration of the trumpet with Norwegian rising star, Tine Thing Helseth. Hailed in 2011 by BBC as the "superstar of tomorrow", Helseth's international acclaim at a young age has taken her all over the world.
This concert, entitled Haydn & Goldenthal will feature Helseth performing Haydn's Trumpet Concerto in Eb with new cadenzas written specifically for this performance. Helseth will present the world premiere of Academy Award-winner Elliot Goldenthal's Trumpet Concerto.
Written with Helseth in mind, Goldenthal - who is perhaps best known for his soundtracks to blockbuster films Alien 3, Batman & Robin, and Titus - will explore the relationship between a performer's artistic liberties and that of the orchestra though the partly-improvisatory musical structure of this new work.
His Waltz & Agitato premiered at the end of January in Rochester. In the last few years he's been super active as opposed to the few before that when nothing was coming out.
I attended the premiere on Sunday in Philadelphia. It was kind of a cool piece. It was about 13 minutes and called "For Trumpet & Strings" a sort of Morton Feldman title. In addition to the concerto, Goldenthal had also composed a cadenza for the Haydn concerto which the soloist Tine Thing Helseth performed on the first half. It was a neat maybe 2 minute cadenza written in the classical style. it would have been borderline acceptable in Haydn's time.
Anyway, the new substantial piece sort of floated in the airspace of Ives Unanswered Question and Copland's Quiet City. But it was like neither of them. I really quite liked it and for once, I think the critic in the Philly Inquirer understood the piece:
