Alison Balsom plays a baroque trumpet — which is to say, an instrument without valves but with vent holes drilled into the tubing to correct the naturally skewed harmonics of the open instrument — and the effect, on this program of Handel and Purcell, is of a voice that has been waiting three centuries to say exactly this.
Let me be direct. The old natural trumpet, however thrilling in its raw, slightly feral way, asks modern listeners to accept a certain amount of tuning compromise as a kind of historical authenticity tax. Balsom refuses to collect it. Every note here sits in tune with the quiet certainty of a statement of fact, and her tone — brilliant but not blaring, warm in the middle register, clean and almost vocal at the top — makes you wonder why anyone ever bothered inventing valves in the first place.
The program itself is largely arranged. Trevor Pinnock and Balsom have shaped most of this material to feature the trumpet in places where Handel wrote for coloratura soprano or where Purcell imagined the oboe. Purists will object. They always do. But the objection misses something important: both Handel and Purcell wrote idiomatically for trumpet in ways that were absolutely central to their aesthetic, and returning trumpet figuration to music that lives in that same sound world feels less like transgression than like restoration of a family resemblance. The suite from King Arthur — that magnificent, battered, semi-operatic hybrid that Purcell somehow turned into one of the great achievements of the English Baroque — loses nothing by Balsom’s interventions. It gains a kind of athletic shine.
The Handel pieces are, if anything, even more satisfying. “Sento la gioia” from Amadigi di Gaula was conceived for a soprano of extraordinary range and agility, and the decision to give it to a trumpet is more than a parlor trick — the runs and trills that would demand extraordinary breath management from a singer become, on Balsom’s instrument, something almost weightless. She executes the ornaments with a specificity that many string players would envy, each trill articulated from the lip rather than simply smeared into the line.
“Eternal Source of Light Divine” — that extraordinary duet from the Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne, written when Handel was still impressing London with his sheer audacity — is here sung by Iestyn Davies. The pairing is ideal. Davies has a countertenor voice of unusual clarity and harmonic purity, and the way his tone and Balsom’s intertwine in the opening phrases is one of those moments that reminds you why live rendition — or its closest recorded equivalent — still matters. The intonation between them is so finely matched it sounds like a single instrument breathing in two registers.
Lucy Crowe’s account of “The Plaint” from The Fairy Queen is another high point, and an instructive one. Purcell’s original assigns this music to the oboe obbligato as much as to the soprano voice — the two lines share a grief that neither can fully articulate alone. Balsom, playing with a legato that approaches the oboe’s reedy sustain more closely than you might expect, makes the substitution feel inevitable. Crowe sings with an unaffected directness that is exactly right for late Purcell, where ornament is always in service of feeling and never a substitute for it.
Pinnock, whose career with The English Concert essentially defined one era of period performance and whose relationship with this repertoire goes back forty years, accompanies with the kind of authority that doesn’t need to announce itself. The ensemble playing is clean and rhythmically alive without the mechanical crispness that sometimes afflicts period bands working under conductors who have internalized the rules so thoroughly they’ve forgotten the spirit.
If there is a reservation, it is this: the suite from The Fairy Queen runs long, and a few of the lighter dances feel slightly undercharacterized — pretty, but not quite inhabited. Balsom is so convincing in the lyrical and virtuoso passages that anything merely decorative can seem like an intermission.
But that is a minor complaint against a release of consistent distinction. Balsom is already one of the most complete brass players before the public, and this program — baroque in spirit, fearlessly contemporary in execution — confirms that she understands not just how to play this music but what it is for.
