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Friday, May 23 – 7:30pm Gary J. Dobbins, reporter What can happen when five renegade trumpet students graduate from the Lyon Conservatory together? Armed with an endless amount of imagination and a desire to expand beyond their musical skills, they set out to stay together and parlay their friendships into something very unique and special. Trumpeters Andre Bonnici, Pierre Ballester, Jean-Luc Richard, Ludovic Roux and Didier Chafford (all former students of Guy Touvron) formed the group known as Ensemble de Trompettes de Lyon. The performance Friday night left a house full of trumpeters pleasantly stunned.
The audience came expecting to hear a musical concert by yet another brass group. What they received was so much more! The audience was treated to a multi-media event involving movement, dance, special lighting effects, singing, mime, and other elements coming together to make this a theatrical experience. The program included these five grown men engaging in a ballet of sorts with a giant balloon while performing Bach. The group kept the balloon in the air, balancing it on their instruments before passing it to a different player. Then, toward the end of the piece, they would bring the balloon to a gentle landing - all this while performing with the finesse of a balloon in flight. In another section of the performance giant pictures of five musical greats were lowered into view. From left to right appeared Maurice Andre, Miles Davis, Boris Vian, Louis Armstrong, and Bournille. As the spotlight drew attention to each individual picture, the group would pay a musical tribute to each, beginning with Badinerie by J.S. Bach for Maurice Andre. They then continued their journey down the row with various musical styles. This non-stop presentation was filled with energy and kept the audience mesmerized. I will never forget seeing the trumpeter finesse and dance his way through a “love affair” with his trumpet. It reminded me of an old Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie. It was unrealistic but humorously convincing at the same time. All the sketches were filled with entertaining visual gags.
One particular theme that is woven into the fabric of the presentation has to do with the “duck quacking notes” which often work their way into the recesses of the trumpet. They can appear when least expected, causing unwanted musical contamination. Much of this program was somewhat dedicated to the idea of ridding the trumpets of all quacking sounds (clams!) for good. This is achieved by laying the little stuffed ducks to rest in their own personalized case and closing the lid. Another attempt at this goal came when the group staged an imaginary skeet shoot using rubber ducks flying through the air as the trumpeters used their instruments as shotguns. Finally, at the end of the program, the stage floor was filled with hundreds of ducks falling from the sky.
The Ensemble de Trompettes de Lyon uses an assortment of instruments, about ten instruments of all shapes and sizes (piccolo trumpet, D trumpet, B flat trumpet, C trumpet, cornet, bugle, tenor bugle, B flat bass trumpet and C bass trumpet.) It is stunning the way each ensemble member played several instruments, each with polish and skill. In spite of all the visual and physical activity on stage, the performance quality of the music remained at a high level of consistency. The music, ranging from Aida to Bach to the Marseillaise to Prokofiev to the Light Calvary, never suffered. Congratulations and thanks to Stephen Chenette who, on a recent trip to France, experienced this talented group of performers and played an important role in bringing them to our conference. The ensemble also had the financial backing of The Henri Selmer Company, Paris. Mr. Chenette, in his informative introduction of the group, seemed at a loss as to how to categorize this brilliant ensemble. I suggest that the group is simply sheer ENTERTAINMENT!
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Trumpet prelude: The Kansas State University Shattering the Glass Ceiling Laurel Littrell Ethereal Tincture* Craig Weston 3-D Musketeer* Jukka Viitasaari Members: Program:
The duck quacking notes… If you were, To meet once in your life this familiar and legendary instrument, which is the trumpet, and if this unique meeting were to make you fall in love within a little more than one hour of everything you can play, make and say with trumpets…then I give you only one address: the address of the Ensemble de Trompettes de Lyon. Five prodigiously competent trumpet masters, in no way starchy, will guide you with lightness, smartness and brilliance through the ages, forms and tones of their mascot instrument, from Aïda to the Corrida, from Bach to The Times of Cherries, from hunting to Monteverdi, from the Marseillaise t Tango, from Prokofiev o the Light Calvary… And as I’m obviously not afraid to paradox, I say it without giving in: it’s so beautiful that it takes your breath away! Françoise Rollin The Foundation The trumpet player has only one enemy, but a really redoubtable one: the duck quacking notes… It creeps into the pistons, it quacks notes when you don’t want to hear anything, and it contaminates Rossini and causes Armstrong to loose feathers… For the creation of the year 2000, the Ensemble de Trompettes de Lyon decided to stop quacking, to take the duck by the horns and to blow down definitely. Therefore, there will be red ducks, yellow ducks, blue ducks, and green ducks in this new show, which you can see, talk and laugh about, but you won’t hear them. The motivations To finalize this project, the Ensemble de Trompettes called on the expertise of Françoise Rollin, full artist as a man of theatre and man of letters, humorist and experienced musician. For this creation, subjects arising out of current events, leisure and news items inspired the interpreters. Moreover, the musicians pay homage to the famous trumpet players of the XXth century. Starting from the world-wide unique instrument, the Ensemble de Trompettes de Lyon wanders around according to how things and time go, according to musical styles, from the Renaissance music to the French Chanson, from Tango to Jazz and offers entertainment to all types of public. The ambition of changing the traditional codes of the musical language leads the Ensemble de Trompettes de Lyon to innovation, so as to offer the public a totally surprising visual show combining suspense, humor and emotion by preserving music of high quality. Ensemble de Trompettes appearance is made possible by Henri Selmer Paris
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