The Star-Ledger , NJ
Feb. 26, 2008

Trumpet puts gleam in NJSO concert

Tuesday, February 26, 2008
BY BRADLEY BAMBARGER
Star-Ledger Staff
CLASSICAL

The nature of an orchestra is to sublimate the individual in favor of
the group, with the spotlight mostly reserved for guest soloists. But
the best ensembles are filled with players who can shine. A couple of
times a season, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra puts one of its own
out front.

Maybe Garth Greenup can croon a tune or maybe he couldn’t carry one
in a bucket. But trumpet in hand, the NJSO principal can sing like
Sinatra. With a mute in the bell of his instrument, Greenup’s tone
was ravishing as he voiced a slow episode in Alexander Arutiunian’s
Concerto for Trumpet like a love song. The sound was dizzingly
romantic, as if nothing else existed for those few quiet minutes.

It was a wonderful change of pace to hear the trumpet out in front of
the NJSO instead of the usual piano or violin. A nearly full house at
the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark seemed to agree on
Sunday afternoon, responding with an almost surprising enthusiasm.
There aren’t that many modern trumpet concertos, with most of the
features heard on symphony programs being brassy Baroque warhorses.

Greenup, a 36-year-old Montclair resident, has been a proponent of
Arutiunian’s concerto for the B-flat trumpet since he was in school,
winning a college brass contest with it. Born in 1920, the Armenian
composer — educated in Moscow — wrote his 20-minute work in 1950 as
a memorial for a friend, the Armenian orchestra’s principal
trumpeter, who had died in World War II. But the piece wasn’t
performed publicly until 10 years later, its nationalist traces of
Armenian folk tunes making it problematic in Stalinist times.

Arutiunian’s idiom is familiar to any who know the folk-accented
works of Aram Khachaturian, the most famous of the Soviet-era
Armenian composers. Although harmonically straightforward, the piece
twists with lyrical arabesques that gave Greenup a chance to show
rhythmic grace and a burnished open-toned sound against winds darting
in the background. In the virtuosic cadenza, his top notes gleamed
like his instrument in the lights.

The conductor was Hans Graf, music director of the Houston Symphony
Orchestra. A consummate musician, Graf is also Austrian, so he knows
how Schubert’s "Unfinished" Symphony goes. But mainstream symphony
orchestras too often plane the "Unfinished" down, lessening its edge.
This piece — which links Beethoven to Brahms in its dramatic shifts
of light and dark — is one of those works that often seems, to echo
Artur Schnabel’s phrase, to be music greater than can be played.

Graf and the NJSO summoned a beautiful sound, but their Apollinian
calm left layers of the score untouched, with more rhythmic snap,
speed and even a rougher timbre required for something special.
Still, such deep-pile strings, mellow swells of brass and ideally
lyrical ensemble aren’t to be taken for granted.

If a shade too comfortable in the Schubert, the NJSO seemed pushed by
Stravinsky’s "The Firebird," particularly the 1945 suite featuring
the composer’s angular modernist retouchings of his most romantic,
coloristic score. The NJSO wasn’t immune to an out-of-tune chord here
or an early entry there, but the performance was more consistent than
a recent one by Russia’s Kirov Orchestra.

Robert Wagner’s arching bassoon solos were a pleasure, never
vinegary. And as the last big, rising-phoenix melody passed from the
strings to the rest of the orchestra, it was stirring, as it always
should be.

Bradley Bambarger may be reached at bbambarger@starledger.com.