Trombone Concertos by Christian Lindberg

Trombone soloists rarely get to play conquering hero. The instrument’s natural habitat is the back row — sepulchral chords in a Bruckner adagio, oom-pahs in a Rossini overture, the occasional glissando joke. So when Christian Lindberg strides to the front of an orchestra, horn — I mean slide — held like a scepter, something in the room shifts. He has spent the better part of four decades convincing composers, audiences, and skeptical brass players like myself that the instrument can sing, snarl, whisper, and showboat with the best of them. This BIS reissue, gathering four concertante works by Nordic composers, makes the case persuasively.

Lindberg’s own contribution, Mandrake in the Corner, wears its comic-book pedigree lightly — you’d never guess the title arrived after the fact, grafted onto music that already had the swagger of a second-rate detective serial. And I mean that as something close to a compliment. There’s real theater in the writing: the first movement barrels forward with a rhythmic insistence that recalls, oddly, the chase sequences of vintage Hollywood scores, while the middle movement slouches into something seedier, all smoky harmonic haze and slippery chromaticism — the kind of music you’d expect drifting out of a bar where nobody asks your name. The finale is just about indecent in its energy, a hell-for-leather Vivace that barely pauses for breath before the final bars slam the door shut. Is it great composition? No. Is it enormous fun, played with total commitment? Yes. Lindberg, as both composer and executant, clearly knows the difference and doesn’t much care.

Axel Jørgensen’s Suite for Trombone and Orchestra is the disc’s dutiful curiosity. A Danish orchestral musician of no great fame, Jørgensen wrote music that stayed largely unheard in his own lifetime, and hearing it now you understand why, without quite dismissing it. There are pleasant enough turns of phrase, moments where the orchestration catches the ear. But melodically it never quite commits to anything memorable. I kept waiting for a theme to plant its flag, and none did. The nearest comparison that comes to mind, uncharitably perhaps, is the vast graveyard of British brass band test-pieces from the 1920s and ‘30s: earnest, competently made, and thoroughly forgotten by everyone except the odd archivist. Lindberg plays it as though he believes in it completely, which is its own kind of virtue.

Egil Hovland is the real discovery here, or ought to be for most listeners. Born in Oslo in 1924 and trained under Vagn Holmboe, Copland, and Dallapiccola, Hovland had already won the Koussevitzky Prize for his Music for Ten Instruments back in 1957 before turning, in the early ‘70s, to this Concerto for Trombone and Orchestra. It emerged on the far side of a serialist period, and you can hear an older, sterner discipline still shadowing the writing even as tonal centers reassert themselves. The first movement opens with a bracing astringency that put me in mind of Shostakovich more than any Scandinavian model — those bare fifths, that clipped orchestral tread. The cadenza, arriving a good six minutes in, is a small masterclass in itself: Lindberg moves from limpid lyricism to needle-sharp articulation without ever seeming to switch gears. But it’s the slow movement that lingers — nocturnal, sparsely scored, the trombone floating over hushed strings like a lone figure crossing an empty square at 3 a.m. I’d rank it among the finer things written for the instrument in the last half-century, and I don’t say that lightly.

Then there’s Jan Sandström, Lindberg’s most fruitful collaborator, represented by Cantos de la Mancha, itself a distillation of the full-length Trombone Concerto No. 2, subtitled Don Quixote. Sandström has a habit of shrinking his big canvases into more portable forms — he did much the same with his Motorbike Concerto, boiling it down into the wickedly entertaining “A Short Ride on a Motorbike.” Here the reduction loses nothing in imaginative voltage. Five compact movements trace episodes from Cervantes’s knight-errant, four bearing wonderfully evocative subtitles — “To walk where the bold man makes a halt,” “To row against a rushing stream” — and the writing ranges from vocalized nonsense-fanfares at the opening to spasms of Messiaen-like color, landing finally in a kind of anguished stillness as Sancho Panza looks down at his battered master. It’s a tour de force, frankly, demanding not just virtuosity but a theatrical instinct that not every soloist possesses. Lindberg possesses it in spades: the multiphonics, the vocal interjections through the instrument, the sheer physical theater of the playing, all delivered with an actor’s timing as much as a performer’s artistry.

Lan Shui and the Singapore Symphony do their job without drawing attention to themselves, which under the circumstances is exactly right. This is Lindberg’s show, and the orchestra knows it. BIS’s engineering has the transparency and body the label reliably delivers; you get real depth behind the soloist rather than a spotlighted cardboard cutout.

Two works here are minor, honorable footnotes. Two are not.