Editor’s note: Our man James is off doing what he needs to do, writing two, maybe three screenplays. Until we can lure him away from those things, we’ll be reminding you that he is the best Classical music journalist in town with the recurring Best of Bash.
Since the Oregon Symphony will be playing Maher’s First Symphony (“Titan”) this upcoming weekend, and this piece calls for five trumpets (*see note at the end of this article), it is high time to talk to Jeffrey Work. Work is completing his fourth season as the principal trumpeter of the Oregon Symphony. He earned a bachelors in music in trumpet performance from the New England Conservatory, a masters from the University of Michigan where he studied with Armando Ghitalla, and then received the first artists diploma ever awarded a trumpeter from the New England Conservatory where he studied with Boston Symphony Orchestra principal trumpeter, Charles Schlueter.
Upon arriving at the front door of Work’s home in SW Portland, I noticed a trumpet that is hung near his front door and I could hear him working on a piece. Work currently owns about 40 trumpets and a number of them are in his living room. Some are in different keys like B flat, C, G, F. Some are coronets and some are piccolo trumpets with which he can play in high notes quickly and cleanly. So, I had to start asking him questions about his trove of trumpets.
With so many trumpets, do you try to match the right trumpet to the piece of music that you will be playing?
Work: Exactly. I try to find the right trumpet for the piece – not only for how it sounds, but also how it feels physically to play. Because there are trumpets that sound fairly similar, but one may be way easier to play certain kinds of music, and another trumpet for other kinds of music.
Is that because of the mouthpiece or the valve action?
Work: It’s probably more because of the design subtleties of the instrument itself – the tapers of the pipes and how they are put together. There are a lot of funny, little variables that are hard to describe.
Which trumpet is the oldest one that you have?
Work: I’ve got one that probably dates back to 1885. It’s an orchestra trumpet from the era of Dvorak or Wagner. In that era, the sound trumpeters were expected to make was very different from today, and I was very interested in having a trumpet which really showed what that was. Soon after that the cornet and the shorter B-flat trumpet took over.
Aren’t cornets shorter that trumpets?
Work: They are physically shorter but the amount of tubing is identical.
So how do you find a trumpet from 1885?
Work: Well, this one has an interesting story. A friend of mine was at a junkyard, and she saw this rotary valve trumpet that looked really great and gave me a call. I was interested , so she took a couple of pictures of it and showed them to me. Then I had to go see for myself.
The manufacturer was Cerveny in Bohemia; they primarily make tubas now. This is a low F Trumpet. So it’s lower than your modern B flat trumpet that every school kid grows up with. Its sound is closer to the French horn family than today’s trumpets. It’s also closer to the valve-less trumpet of the Baroque era. When I saw it at the junk store, it was in great condition, and I picked it up and played it right away to test. I bought it for $175. I spent more money having it cleaned up and getting an F pipe made for it.
I have used this trumpet to teach, because most students have no idea what a trumpet sounded like before 1900.
What’s the difference in tubing between a cornet and a trumpet?
Work: A trumpet is a cylindrical-bore instrument; so the pipe gets bigger up to a certain point then stays the same and then gets bigger again. The cornet has a conical bore; so it gets bigger all the way through. The cornet also uses a larger and more V-shaped mouthpiece. So, the sound from a coronet is mellower. The mellowest or darkest of all is the flugelhorn. That’s what you grew up hearing Chuck Mangione play.
In contrast, the French trumpet tradition is a very bright sound, and, in fact, I won my job in the Oregon Symphony on a French trumpet. I just couldn’t get comfortable with the American trumpets that everyone usually plays.
Why do you have so many trumpets?
Work: Before I got this job with the Oregon Symphony, I didn’t have to do much pops repertoire. When I got here I realized that I would be playing pops concerts for Norman Leyden, who is a legend, and started to get interested in different trumpets that would give me more pop-styled sounds. Ebay is now my friend, and some of the cheapest trumpets that I’ve acquired have been useful tools for me. I spent $300 or $400 on one of my main pops trumpets. I can play a lot of standard, commercial repertoire on it. We just had a fabulous 40s show with Jeff Tyzik, and I played most of the program with that trumpet.
At the Oregon Symphony, you try to match up the sound in the trumpet section?
Work: Yes! My dream scenario for any trumpet section is to have an Austrio-Germanic trumpet – trumpet with rotary valves (French horn valves) and a darker trumpet and a brighter trumpet. So then you can choose your starting point – for example, play C in the staff with a medium-loud volume – and build your palette from there.
With a coronet, you have another set of colors that you are working with. So, I like to talk to my colleagues and say, let’s use the brilliant trumpets for this piece and darker ones for another piece, and so on. When we play Beethoven, we use the Austrio-Germanic rotaries. That gives a unified approach.
When did you start to play the trumpet?
Work: I was almost nine years old. My father was always pointing out the trumpet sound when he played LPs of classical music, and in elementary school, a teacher showed off the various instruments, and he sounded better on the trumpet; so I started with it. It’s always hard to get a good start with an instrument, because your first teacher might not really be trained on a trumpet, and then you can acquire bad habits that get corrected much, much later. I got a terrific teacher. His name was Pete Crino. I only had him for a year, because my family moved from New York to Virginia, but we found another excellent teacher, Bob Ferguson. He was the first chair trumpeter for the United States Army Band. I think that he was their first chair player for at least 20 years. He usually didn’t take a kid who was nine years old, but I was willing to work hard. He was the right person for me.
Strangely enough, about a year ago, I decided to Google Pete Crino and found two postings about him. One of them was from a friend of mine in my fourth grade class, and he is an excellent trumpeter. I got in touch with him and found out that Crino was living in Vermont; so I called him up and had a wonderful chat with him.
When I lived in Virginia, I was in the all-Virginia orchestra when it played Mahler’s First Symphony, and a friend of mine said that I should listen to Bruno Walter recordings because Walter knew Mahler. Anyway, Crino told me over the phone that he played trumpet on a Bruno Walter recording of Mahler’s Second Symphony with the New York Philharmonic. That just blew me away, because I’ve been a big Bruno Walter fan. I’ve got all of his recordings, including that one.
So, for Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, you are going to use one of your Austrio-Germanic rotaries?
Work: No; I’m going to play one of the darker of my orchestra trumpets. It was made by David Monette here in Portland. It’s my main orchestra trumpet and has a fuller sound than the French trumpet that I used to win the job here. It has that world-weary, sad-and-happy at the same time sound that can work well for Mahler.
You were noted as one of the best freelance players in the Boston area before coming to the Oregon Symphony. Did orchestra personnel have your phone number on their speed dial?
Work: Sometimes I was the guy who was asleep by his phone when one of the Boston Symphony players got sick. I’d get a call, and they’d ask me to come to Symphony Hall in 25 minutes to play “Ein Heldenleben.”
Wow!
Work: That really did happen once. I was awakened by the personnel manager of the BSO, and he told me that they had a public dress rehearsal and asked me if I could come in to do it.
I did a lot of playing for the BSO and freelanced with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and the Emmanuel Music. I played for the Boston Pops now and then as well.
Eill you be playing in a music festival this summer?
Work: I’ll be playing in a couple of them. This is my twelfth season with the Colorado Music Festival in Boulder. Michael Christie, the director of the Phoenix Symphony is the music director the festival in Boulder. I’ll also do a couple of weeks at the Sunriver Music Festival.
—-
* Extra note from Jeffrey Work: Although Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 calls for five trumpets, the fifth part is rarely done, because it doubles the French horns on the final page of music. So, the Oregon Symphony performance will use four trumpets.
The post BEST OF BASH from March 17, 2010: Trumpet talk with Jeffrey Work appeared first on Oregon Music News.