Alison Balsam

Alison Balsom’s fourth CD for EMI Classics features Franz Joseph Haydn and Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s evergreen trumpet concertos, coupled with concertos by Johann Baptist Georg Neruda and Giuseppe Torelli. Balsom also directs Die Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen.

Festive baroque or sparkling virtuoso: the trumpet has many faces, and it is still an absolute exception to find a woman among the great virtuosos of this instrument. The young British trumpeter Alison Balsom is one of these exceptional phenomena. In 2006, Alison Balsom was crowned "Young British Classical Performer of the Year" by the quality watchdogs of classical music; the British Gramophone magazine also awarded her a Gramophone Award 2006. Their current album "Caprice" combines exotic and high virtuosity, lyrical and romantic.

What seems to be an unlikely pairing of former Led Zeppelin vocalist Robert Plant and bluegrass superstar Alison Krauss is actually one of the most effortless-sounding duos in modern popular music…

2013 Gramophone Artist of the Year, three time winner at the Classic BRITs and also three time winner at the Echo Klassik Awards, Alison Balsom OBE has cemented an international reputation as one of classical music’s great ambassadors and is ranked amongst the most distinctive and ground-breaking musicians on the international circuit today. With this release Alison records on the natural trumpet for the first time since the hugely successful album Sound the Trumpet. Inspired by seasonal Baroque repertoire, the recording includes Bach’s concertos by Corelli, Torelli, and Fasch performed with the Academy of Ancient Music under the direction of violinist Pavlo Besnosiuk.

In the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee, Alison Balsom celebrates the heroic era of the Baroque trumpet in works by George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) and Henry Purcell (1658 or 1659-1695), whose anthems, odes, sinfonias and operas have provided the music for numerous royal celebrations from their own day to the present.