This Saturday the quartet will travel down to beautiful Cornwall for a concert in the village of Portscatho. In this recital we have chosen to include in our first half two short pieces by Kagel. Kagel who died age 76 in 2008 left a legacy of music for film, stage and theatre. His music is Avante Garde and theatrical in style. The pieces we are playing are preceded in the score by instructions on how to stand as a group on stage and the parts are full of precise performance instructions including where to breathe and how to articulate each note. In rehearsal we pay particular attention to his tempo markings and dynamics striving to play exactly what is on the page.
These short pieces are in sharp contrast to the Bach arrangements we play where style, sound, phrasing and even tuning come in for much debate. No one recording of Bach’s Fugues sounds the same and perhaps it is this wealth of diversity that keeps Bach’s music so fresh and popular. One of the pieces that can move me to tears is Bach’s Mass in B Minor. I have played it a few times with the other girls both in our living rooms on ‘toots’ (that’s when we get together to eat chocolate and play our favourite pieces) and in concerts. The Agnus Dei played well is enough to make even the toughest person weep. If you don’t know it, buy it, lie down in a darkened room and put it on now!
Katie has chosen to arrange the Misericordia from the Magnificat and the deep sound of four B flat trumpets suits it really well. According to Clare many Baroque pieces would have been played at the time on the instruments available and J.S Bach’s The Art of Fugue doesn’t even suggest instrumentation on the autographed scores. We will play Paul Archibalds transcription of Contrapunctus IX published by Brass Wind.
Clare will be playing the beautiful solo from Albinoni’s famous Adagio. Clare plays the natural trumpet and studied with Bob Farley, one of London’s leading nat players, so she was going for authenticity in style. We clashed a little in the rehearsal as Vickie had all the drama of a brass band version whizzing through her head and I was fantasising about the wonderful Maurice Andre recording.
If you are able to make the recital we look forward to meeting you and hope that you enjoy your evening as much as we will.

The quartet gave the much anticipated premiere of Glassblowing by Paul Burnell for the Newark Music Club at the Palace Theatre on Saturday 6th Febuary.
The score included the following information:

“Glassblowing is the process where molten or heat-softened glass is inflated by
blowing air into it with the aid of a blowpipe and worked into the desired shape using
various tools. Objects made using this process include bottles, bowls, jars, window
glass and wine glasses”

The Palace Theatre has a traditional proscenium arch stage and we had a beautiful backdrop behind us. The piece opened to a darkened stage with a spotlight on a table with glasses and bottles of different shapes and sizes on it. We silently walked on stage and began playing the wine glasses one by one. As the sound from the glasses emerged an electronic drone began. We then took our positions and picked up our trumpets for the first movement. The drone continues throughout the piece, the first movement uses block chords and spaces to dramatic effect and the second movement quietly bubbles away with interjecting wah wah effects on plunger mutes. The final movement is a solo muted trumpet recitative followed by a fast paced, rhythmical end.
We absolutely loved performing it because the reaction from the audience was so immediate and diverse. How great to be able to present something new and so theatrical. It has really inspired us all to consider other ways of using both other arts mediums and audiovisual technology in future projects.
We have plans to perform Paul Burnell’s piece again soon and would like to thank him for writing us such a fantastic piece. If you get a chance to see his music performed, do go, I guarantee an artistically satisfying show.

If you want to hear a little about what the quartet is up to in 2010 tune into www.bcbradio.co.uk on Christmas Day at around 11am for Chris Benson’s show. The quartet is braving the colder climate in January and Febuary with concerts in Yorkshire, Cumbria and Newark.

We have done our last rehearsal of 2009 now and tonight we are all going out for our Christmas party to celebrate another year together. The first Christmas season the group formed we were all poor students at the Royal Academy and so we went to Hampstead in London and busked until the police moved us on. It was freezing cold but we managed to make enough for a three course meal and plenty of wine on the Southbank. I don’t think the waiter was very happy when we paid a £100 bill with small change! No busking today but it is definatly worth walking through the snow tonight to go and catch up with the girls.

I hope you can tune in on Christams day and I look forward to keeping you updated with our activities in 2010.

I have to start this post with an apology; it has been so long since I have updated this site that it is gradually falling into a state of disrepair. The main reason for this is that we are currently building our new site and the content for this newer glossier version has been given most of my time. We are hoping that the new site will be easy to use and have lots of additional information such as sound clips and composer information, useful press packs and all our latest news.

So, what have we been up to over the last few months? Well, Katie is well and truly integrated into the group and we have done several recitals and workshops with her now. Our rehearsals are really enjoyable as we get to grips with some new repertoire and inevitably find our playing challenged by the many new works we have coming in from composers. One of our favourite pieces is Colori di Roma by Peter Longworth. We premiered this at the Caledonian Club in September and we have several more performances planned for it. It begins with a haunting flugel horn melody, has a second movement that sounds like rippling water, a third movement that intimates the heat of the sun and finishes with a soaring trumpet melody. Our audience loved it and we felt very privileged to have worked with Peter on it. We are hoping to record some of it for a short CD in the new year.
In the New Year we will be revisiting some of the Kagel fanfares and also working on playing some of our pieces from memory. We played Jimmy Van Heusen’s Imagination without music recently and we all agreed it was good not to have to rummage through our pads (mine is always the most disorganised) to find the encore! Singers and instrumental soloists normally perform without music but brass musicians are often reluctant to take this step, perhaps because our traditional home was at the back of the orchestra. We hope it will help us have a deeper feel for the music and take away the visual barrier that the music stand is between performer and audience.
As always for this time of year we have enjoyed doing the usual array of Messiahs and Christmas concerts, but the girls have also been doing some very exciting solo projects. Clare gave a sensational performance of the Hummel Trumpet Concerto with St Pauls Sinfonia, I thoroughly enjoyed seeing her play. Katie is presenting a seminar on the natural trumpet at University College London in the cloisters on Sunday 13th December and Vickie is rehearsing with a very funky 1940’s dance band called Bombshellettes.

The city of Durham is such a beautiful place and we were made to feel very at home during our week long stay at the Durham International Brass Festival. We really packed in the performances. In 5 days we did 12 outreach concerts, a radio broadcast for Durham FM and a recital of contemporary and baroque music at Elvet Church.

This tour for us was particularly emotional because it was the last work that Nicole did with us as a member of Bella Tromba. Nicole is moving onto other things and although we will still be seeing a lot of her during our freelance playing it was the last official date for her.

Nicole founded Bella Tromba with us in September 2004 when we met as postgrads at the Royal Academy of Music. She was there with us for ‘the one man and his dog audience’ concerts we used to do in a local church to try out our repertoire. For years she was the only driver and we used to squeeze into her car for mammoth journeys up to Cumbria with 20 trumpets, 4 suitcases and far too much chocolate and trashy magazines.

She has premiered some of the most fantastic pieces with us at the Purcell Room and the Cheltenham Festival and she has been an asset to the group not only for her playing but also for her patience, sense of humour and determination. We were all really sad to see her go but glad that unlike Robbie Williams in Take That we can still be mates!

We are delighted to be able to bring in Katie Hodges as a new member of Bella Tromba. Katie has worked with us on many occasions. She has even stepped in at the last minute to sightread recital programs with great confidence when someone was ill. Katie is a fellow Northener, although she doesn’t have the brass band roots that Vickie does. Katie’s work has been predominantly orchestral. She works with, among others, the BBC Concert Orchestra, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. Katie is passionate Baroque music and performs regularly on the natural trumpet in the UK and Europe.

We are kick starting this new stage for us with a week in Mielec, Poland studying with Thomas Slusarzyk at the Mielec Music School. We don’t plan on asking katie to do any initiation rituals but we do have plenty of new repertoire to learn including a new work by Peter Longworth called Colori di Roma.

We are working on bringing a new website out but please bear with us while we put it all together. If you have any suggestions on what you would like to see on it let us know!

From the 12th to the 17th July Bella Tromba will be heading up North to Durham for BRASS: Durham International Festival 2009.

Blowing its way across County Durham this year’s festival offers everything from traditional brass bands to afro-beat, Balkan brass madness to classical ensembles, folk-brass to contemporary jazz.

At the last count there were over 40 events, many of them free, with at least 40 brass ensembles and 250 top-class artists from Mexico, Iceland, Austria, Germany, Macedonia, Finland, France, Ireland, Canada, Cuba, Switzerland, USA, Nigeria, the Netherlands and the UK.

We have a fairly hectic schedule at BRASS 2009 with an average of three concerts a day at local schools and community centres. At the end of the week we will perform a recital at Elvet Church with several new additions to our repertoire. Maxwell Davies’ Fanfare for Carinthia is a typically dramatic opening and contrasts perfectly with the sublime dance melodies of Henri Tomasi’s Suite for Three Trumpets. The Max is available on the Max Opus label alongside one of our other favourites Telos 135. As we go into banding territory again Vickie, freshly enthused from the Whit Friday Marches at the weekend, insisted we include a new piece with a flavour of this heritage. So we will be including Rodriguez’s Concierto De Aranjuez made famous by the film Brassed Off. Miles Davies take on it in his Sketches of Spain album isn’t bad either! We will finish off the evening with our rendition of The Carnival of Venice.

We hope you can join us.

Clare and I were lucky enough to set off to Northern Ireland in conjunction with Live Music Now and Comic Relief where we visited some beautiful towns. Banbridge, Omagh and even stopped off for lunch in Belfast before we headed home. Our total trip consisted of two nights and in that, four workshops. We worked in several schools and visited a young carers group where we got them all playing hosepipes and even got a couple of the children performing a piece with us to the rest the group.
I do hope we get to return soon, we had beautiful weather and obviously had to sample the guiness, a trip worthwhile just for this!
Bella Tromba are booked up with weddings and officers mess evenings in the next few weeks……and soon Clare will be……. married! Hen night is just around the corner!

This weekend we visited a rural village called Milverton near Taunton. It was great to get out of London and breathe some fresh air and enjoy some local hospitality. Myself and Vickie went down to do a couple of workshops the day before our recital. We vistied an old folks home and after we had played a few pieces we had a couple of glasses of sherry and a sing a long to the White Cliffs of Dover. In the local pub we had the most fanatastic meal and I got to try Cornish Yarg cheese. Clare is a big fan and is planning on having a cheese cake for her wedding this year featuring this particular type.

I stayed with a lovely couple who gave me homemade museli for breakfast and let me practice in their Yoga Studio. Fantastic. After the concert we had a chance to chat to some of the audience. Vickie had suggested to the concert promoter that she contact the local brass band so we had a few brass players in the audience too. It was especially good to meet the conductor of the Milverton Silver Band who told me some funny stories about my old trumpet teacher Jon Holland who he had been in NYO with. Apparently when they were playing a concert and were doing a spot of off stage stuff on the balcony at the Albert Hall they were playing catch with their trumpets. Throwing them up in the air and catching them again. Just imagine if the audience had turned round and seen them.

The group is up in Harrogate now doing some extended projects in special schools in the area. It’s work that the group really enjoys and I am sure we will give you some new stories about our travels soon.

Although they may look like a modern invention mutes have been around for hundreds of years. The first documented use of the Trumpet mute was in the Toccata from Monteverdi’s Opera L’Orfeo (1607). The mutes used at this time changed the pitch of the trumpet up a tone, as they sealed up the bell on contact with the instrument, making the trumpet slightly shorter.
Bella Tromba are proud and lucky to be sponsored by Denis Wick, producers of mutes for all brass instruments and other brass accessories. Over the summer we visited the warehouse to try out lots of different mutes and get matching mutes for the whole quartet. We now have mutes for every occasion including some wooden straight mutes which make a beautiful soft, subtle sound, to my new favourite the brass bottomed straight mute. This mute had a really bright, bold edge to it.
Denis Wick also make mouthpieces and Jo has been trying out the new Maurice Murphy mouthpiece

“I love my new MM mouthpiece. The gold plating is so smooth and soft on my lips and doesn’t have all the annoying nicks and scratches that my old mouthpiece has. The sound is much bigger and brighter and I have found it really rings out in the orchestra. My new 3 PA mouthpiece is also great. I did a performance of the Hummel on Eb trumpet the other day and found it so much easier in the high range. I would recommend Denis Wick mouthpieces.”

Next week Bella Tromba have a recital at Swinburne Hall for the Colchester Institute. Once again we’ll be performing Hugo Ribiero’s Gestures III (premiered at Deal Festival this summer), which uses mutes throughout and makes particular use of the Harmon Mute and its wah-wah effect.

On Saturday 9th August, the group will be travelling up to Bicester for the Bicester Jazz Festival 2008. This week we have been rehearsing with Yazz Ahmed, a jazz trumpeter who has recently exited the Guildhall School of Music and Drama where she studied on the postgraduate jazz course. Check out her my space at http://www.myspace.com/yazzahmed. We are also taking our resident percussionist with us, Steve Burke.

For this event, we have had an original piece of New Orleans/Dixieland tune written for us by Paul Robinson, bass guitarist/french horn player based in Oldham. Also Yazz has kindly arranged some Miles Davies tunes and James Davies has also been arranging some well known tunes for us. Gavin Broom has recently arranged a selection of Cole Porter tunes which we performed at Harrogate festival only a few weeks ago which will be getting another outing.

Come and check us out at the Jazz Festival, we’ll be playing in Bicester Village in the Shopping Outlet at 4pm.

“Make a date in your diary for the 9th and 10th August when Bicester Jazz festival comes to town for the 7th consecutive year. As always there will be a weekend of free Jazz entertainment for all to enjoy.
Popular musicians such as accomplished trumpeter Bryan Corbett and “spellbinding” Esther Miller return to entertain the crowds, whilst Oxfordshire Saxophonist, Ewen Baird, joins a thrilling weekend line-up including dazzling trumpet quartet Bella Tromba.
UK-based New Zealander Brendan Power will be playing for the first time. He’s acknowledged by many as one of the most creative skilled and versatile harmonica players around today.
The event begins on Saturday in Bicester Village at 10.30am and runs through until 8pm, with music continuing throughout the evening in Carluccio’s restaurant.” - continue reading at http://www.bicestervillage.com/Bicester/village/newsevents.asp?vId=10690