Paul Merkelo’s “Enlightened” Trumpet Album

from the Bandcamp Web page for this recording

As I do my best to catch up on the queue of recent recordings that I have accumulated, one of the more appealing that I have encountered has the title The Enlightened Trumpet. The album features Paul Merkelo, Principal Trumpet with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, performing concertos by (in “order of appearance”) Joseph Haydn (Hoboken VII3/1 in E-flat major), Georg Philipp Telemann (TWV 51:D7 in D major), Leopold Mozart (in D major), and Johann Nepomuk Hummel (WoO 1 in E major). The album title reflects the fact that all four of these composers are associated with the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment. Merkelo performs with the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Marios Papadopoulos. This seems to be one of those albums that Amazon.com decided to distribute only in digital form, but Bandcamp has created a Web page for purchase in both physical and digital media.

I have a somewhat personal connection to this repertoire. Unless I am mistaken, Wynton Marsalis’ first classical album, a vinyl recording released by what was then Columbia Records, consisted of three of these four concertos (all by the Telemann selection). At the time I was delighted to add this to my collection, but I gradually grew disenchanted as Marsalis shifted his priorities over to jazz and I became more sensitive to eighteenth-century performance practices and rhetorical devices. Merkelo’s allegiances may extend beyond the Age of Enlightenment; and neither his instrument nor the accompanying ensemble honor “period practices.” Nevertheless, he gives clear accounts of all four concertos on the album, seeks out approaches to both dynamics and phrasing through which he supplies his own personal stamp, and establishes a relationship with the Oxford ensemble that captures the intimacy of the period, even if the sonorities are all very much in the immediate present.

None of these concertos get consistent attention in concert programming. Of the four the Haydn is the one most listeners are likely to encounter, usually when an ensemble decides that the Principal Trumpet is due for a turn in the spotlight. However, Merkelo provided his own cadenza for the Haydn concerto; so even that portion of the album has its own share of uniqueness. As to the rest of the album, all three of the composers deserve more attention than they tend to get!