Concerto pour trompette et orchestre à cordes Robert Planel

trompette et piano

Despite completing thorough musical studies and winning a Grand Prix de Rome in 1933, Planel preferred a career as an educator and, in the late 1930s, became a professor and then inspector of musical education for the City of Paris and Département de la Seine. Nonetheless, alongside his administrative work he composed some forty works in all genres, in a musical style that showed the influences of Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel as well as that of jazz.The Concerto for Trumpet and String Orchestra, composed in 1966, is dedicated to the great French trumpeter Maurice André, who gave its first performance at the Salle Gaveau in Paris with the Fernand Oubradous orchestra.The work is in classical three-movement form, fast-slow-fast. The musical style is admittedly remote from the sort advocated by the avant-garde of the 1960s,adopting instead an elegant, even charming tone, with refined orchestration, a neo-classical language redolent of the 1930s and, at times, a slightly jazzy atmosphere.The first movement, marked Broadly, energetically and very rhythmically' contains numerous metrical changes. Here the trumpet and strings have a lively dialogue. The tripartite second movement, Slow and calm', features the muted trumpet supported by the strings, and is slightly reminiscent both of Debussy's amous Clair de lune and the slow movement of Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major. The dramatic climax is attained in the middle of the movement, when the trumpet finally bursts forth freely, without its mute. The principal difficulty for the soloist here is not a matter of technique but rather of endurance, as the composer requires the trumpeter to sustain long melodic lines. The third movement, Vivace Gaily and lightly' follows without a break and requires numerous changes of dynamic. In the solo part, significant intervallic leaps alternate with chromatic passages supported by the strings. A final virtuosic cadenza, in themanner of Romantic concertos, provides the work's brilliant conclusion.