Bowden’s Contemporary Trumpet Concerto Album

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of Shuman Public Relations)

One week from today will see the release of Storyteller: Contemporary Concertos for Trumpet featuring Mary Elizabeth Bowden as the soloist. For those that cannot wait, Amazon.com (as usual) has created a Web page for processing pre-orders. As might be guessed, this is an “album with an agenda,” confronting the “male-dominated field” (the latter quote from the liner notes for Vivian Fung’s trumpet concerto). Indeed, Fung is one of four female composers on the album, the others being Clarice Assad, Sarah Kirkland Snider, and Reena Esmail. The other composers included are Tyson Gholston Davis and James M. Stephenson, the latter providing the first and last tracks.

To be fair, here in “enlightened” San Francisco (scare quotes intended!), Snider’s music will be played by pianist Adam Tendler in a little less than a month, when he will present his Inheritances recital. Those that have been following this site for some time may recall that articles about Assad date all the way back to May of 2017, when the New Century Chamber Orchestra performance of her Impressions suite was one of the high points of the evening. The following month the Kronos Quartet performed Esmail’s arrangement of a raga composed by the Indian violinist N. Rajam. If any of the composers on the album are “strangers in this town,” it is Stephenson!

Where the music is concerned, Bowden performs with the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Allen Tinkham. The compositions by Stephenson, Assad, Fung, Davis, and Esmail are all receiving world premiere recordings, while the Snider selection, “Caritas,” is a new arrangement of music originally composed for mezzo, string quartet, and harp. (The program book includes the text that was sung in that version.) Sadly, for all that originality, there was very little on the album that prompted me to sit up and take notice; and I am sorry to confess that the very first track, Stephenson’s “The Storyteller” (which inspired the title of the album) included a reference to Igor Stravinsky that I found positively cringe-inducing.

I suspect that my familiarity with Assad’s work was the album’s greatest asset. “Bohemian Queen” amounts to a synthesis of the concerto and tone poem genres. The first two movements are inspired by paintings by Chicago-based Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–1977), who was known as “the queen of the bohemian artists.” The final movement, “Hyde Park Jam” recalls how Abercrombie would throw parties for major jazz performers and then play piano with them! Taken as a whole, this was a “concerto with character,” which distinguished it significantly from the other tracks.

Mind you, those other tracks served up many engaging sonorities and rhetorical turns; but none of the other selections (all of which were shorter than Assad’s concerto) offered much to sustain attentive listening. Bowden, of course, maintained a solid command of her technical dexterity. Nevertheless, it was hard for me to avoid wishing that she had been better served by the composers she had selected. There was no shortage of points for trying, but they can take the attentive listener only so far!