Malcolm Arnold: Trumpet Concerto Op.125

Description

Contemporary-music-without-tears has always been his aim, and this succinct little three-movement work showed him as skilful as ever in unpretentious directness of utterance, as it were in the vernacular. For the soloist it is a gift, alike in the first movement's almost indispensable fanfare-like challenges, in melody sometmes as nostalgic as Poulenc (especially haunting in the seductively scored central Andante) and in the Finale's flashes of virtuosity.Jona Chissell, The Times, 31 January 1983