On Angels the Dutch trumpeter Marco Blaauw, born in Lichtenvoorde in 1965, gathers ten pieces for trumpet by composers with very different backgrounds, most of them in first recordings. Blaauw has made the development of the trumpet, its technique and its repertoire his central concern, and several works were written for him or at his suggestion. For more than thirty years he has worked as a soloist specialising in contemporary music, and as a member of Ensemble Musikfabrik in Cologne. The disc was placed on the quarterly list of the German Record Critics' Award (1/2014).
Blaauw plays trumpet, double-bell trumpet, cornet, flugelhorn, bukkehorn and conch shells. In the ensemble pieces he is joined by Markus Schwind, Nathan Plante and Ralf-Werner Kopp on trumpets, Christine Chapman on horn and Bruce Collings on trombone, with Michiel Braam on piano in the last two tracks. The recording is a co-production with Südwestrundfunk. As Blaauw puts it, the pieces became "spiritual and angelic beings made of vibrating air."
The double-bell trumpet is at the centre of several works. Rebecca Saunders's Neither (2011) is a duo for two of them, Wounded Angel (2012) by Agata Zubel and 23 Sentences & Autograph (2003) by Martijn Padding are solos. Liza Lim's Wild Winged-One (2007) is for C cornet with wacky whistle, and Georg Friedrich Haas's ... Einklang freier Wesen ... is heard in Blaauw's own solo version for quarter-tone flugelhorn. Richard Ayres's No. 37C - Sjonnie Kurzak (a broken soul) ascends and Martin Smolka's pianissimo, both from 2002, are for four trumpets, the latter with bucket mutes.
Two older pieces frame the new ones. Carl Ruggles's Angels (1921, revised 1960), a sextet for muted brass, gives the disc its title, and Jimmy Rowles's The Peacocks (1975) closes it in a version for double-bell trumpet and prepared piano. Blaauw's own Deathangel (2012) is a multi-track piece for conch shells with piano resonance, bukkehorn, double-bell trumpet, ambient noise and the voice of his father.
CD, Wergo WER 6781 2, released in 2013, 73 minutes.
