It’s usually asking for trouble to stress a musician’s uniqueness. Someone, often a Times reader, will tell you of another performer or composer who has matched the feats of your subject, and politely scold you for skimping on your homework. However, in the case of the young classical trumpeter Alison Balsom, the claim of singularity seems less rash. The clues are there in that last sentence: classical; trumpeter; Alison. Put it this way, if there is another such trumpetress blowing around these islands, she has kept herself well muted.
This summer she was named Female Artist of the Year at the Classical Brits. It is the latest in a sequence of honours over the past three years, beginning when she was hailed, also by the Brits, as Best Young Performer. With an appearance at the Last Night of the Proms tomorrow, the 30-year-old virtuoso stands not only at the threshold of serious celebrity but also on the brink of an alluring dilemma.
When she and others consider this dilemma, the precedent of her contemporary, the mezzo soprano Katherine Jenkins, is never far away. There are at least superficial similarities, in that both are blonde, good-looking, classically trained British musicians with eclectic tastes, outgoing personalities and a strong sense of mission. Balsom, her image consultants and her recording company EMI all see the appeal of commercial breakthrough and musical crossover, as Jenkins’s albums regularly top the classical charts.
Balsom has made no secret of her own ambitions of playing with such diverse artists as Kanye West, Mark Ronson and Eminem. At the same time she sees serious differences between her own and Jenkins’s aspirations, and she expresses these with a slightly weary diplomacy.
“I do feel I’m unfairly bracketed with her, and I’m not embarrassed about saying that. If the comparisons were with musicians I completely admire, ones who have inspired me with their talent, integrity and artistic vision, then perhaps . . . but to be compared with someone who is not necessarily immediately associated with those qualities is an obvious insult. We’re both young and blonde and classical so we must be the same. I can forgive that. In a taxi I get asked, ‘What do you do, love? . . . Oh, I love Katherine Jenkins.’ I don’t find that upsetting; I feel she has done fantastically well and I really like her as a person, but the comparisons are not made by anyone who has thought it through.”
She is speaking in a café in the German town of Leipzig, a couple of hours after bringing a capacity audience at the concert hall in Weimar to its feet with her playing of Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto in E flat. She cuts a dazzling figure on the concert platform. She is tall, bejewelled and designer-dressed but utterly focused on the music. By the end of the 15-minute piece she looks moved almost to tears by the sound that has been coming from around and within her, and then by the effusive rows of spectators rising from their seats. One reviewer, after hearing her perform a programme of Vivaldi, Handel and Purcell in Bath, wrote: “You have to imagine a stunning blonde, sexier than any model but dressed just like one, playing with such brio that I wanted to dance. It was amazing.”
It’s a peculiar job, she says, one that she always wanted to do, and now loves doing, but which doesn’t lead to anything else. Weird is the word she uses. “And weirder as you get older. When you start out, you think, ‘Am I going to make it? Am I going to be good enough?’ That does diminish, but then you find yourself wondering whether you would feel more comfortable if you thought there might be something else coming up when you reached 60.”
When she tells the story of how she came to play the trumpet, there is both gratitude and regret — the first at the quality of the teaching she received, the second at how threadbare music tuition in schools has become since then. She grew up in the small Hertfordshire town of Royston. Her father was a builder and her mother was involved in the placement of children in foster homes. Although neither was a musician, there were instruments in the house, as well as a genetic gift that seems to have come down from her grandfather, a natural and self-taught pianist.
There was a moment of epiphany when her parents took her to see the great Swedish trumpeter Hakan Hardenberger play the Hummel concerto at the Barbican. It was there that she realised her vocation was to be a soloist rather than one of the orchestral players. By this time she was 10, and had been playing for three years. The great jazzer Dizzy Gillespie had been her first inspiration. “I remember thinking it was not so much about the trumpet itself; the singing sound he was making just happened to be through that instrument.”
There was Bill Thompson, who taught her at the Tannery Drift School in Royston until she was 9, then Adrian Jacobs at Greneway School for the next four years. Then came the Junior Department of Guildhall School of Music, where her teacher was the trumpeter John Miller, who is now director of brass studies at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. She says she was so devastated when he went north that she thought she’d have no choice but to follow him there and then give up the instrument when he died of old age. “He was a huge influence in a way that neither of us expected,” she says. “His teaching was all about sound. We didn’t actually play anything from the repertoire for seven years. I loved it so much I never wanted it to finish.”
Why so few like her? It has to do with the history of the instrument, she says, and with the “macho place” it has occupied in Britain’s mining communities and military bands. “So people assume it has to be played in a macho way, whereas the truth is that, if an instrument is any good, it has to have a masculine and a feminine side. I find it very interesting when I take masterclasses: the girls tend to make it gentler, nicer to listen to, while the boys tend to be more confident, more brazen.”
With her in Leipzig this evening is her boyfriend, Edward Gardner, the 35-year-old music director of English National Opera. They have been going out for six months. They first met when they were working with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra three and a half years ago. She later asked him if he would conduct for her Caprice album. He recalls that it was the first such request he had had. To which she replies that if she’d known that she would never have asked him.
His presence has had an enormous impact in her life, she says, and he nods to say this is mutual. “To have someone so talented and passionate,” she says of him, “who can understand the highs and lows of being a musician, all the irrational thoughts and emotions, that’s amazing.”
He’s managed to fit the German trip into his own busy schedule — he’s currently working on the ENO production of Turandot, Puccini’s last opera, with the director Rupert Goold. The admin of romance is not easy. “Even on our second date,” she says, “he was asking me what I’m doing in January 2012. We just have to be really organised. We are both being asked to take on more than we can, and we have been fortunate with our timetables so far.”
“The more I talk to Alison,” he says, “The more I realise how different our lives are, musically. For me, it’s all about looking after the orchestra, so I have my back to the audience.” “Yes,” she says, “you are looking after the others and I am looking after myself. Your job is to bring everyone together and make sure they’re OK.”
“It takes my breath away when I go to her concerts,” Gardner says. “I think she is simply unbelievably good. It’s the sheer beauty of the sound, even if I have heard it a number of times.”
Apart from making a record each year, Balsom also reckons to play about 75 concerts, although last year she did a good deal more. When the challenges aren’t musical, they are nautical. Like the yachtswoman Ellen MacArthur, she came from a landlocked county but developed a passion for sailing. She lives within reach of the waters around Studland Bay in Dorset, where she and the family regularly went on holiday.
Does she ever think about starting a family of her own? “Of course I do. I know it would be quite a challenge to make that work. But not impossible. People do it all the time, and I would relish that challenge.”
That other challenge — how to proceed as a potentially very famous musician — is enough to be going on with. It is not just her own profile she thinks about raising but also that of the instrument she plays. “It’s a huge battle to fight,” she says. “Just to try and be a great musician, to play well enough in public, is hard enough. So is trying to change the [public] psyche in relation to the trumpet, and to the classical music it plays. The fact that I wear nice dresses and jewellery does not mean that I want to be branded as a light classical artist. All these things I am trying to juggle, and if I want to make any headway I’m going to have to work at it all the time.”
Alison Balsom plays the Last Night of the Proms tomorrow (www.bbc.co.uk/proms). She performs Haydn with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic at Philharmonic Hall on Sept 17 and 18, and at Preston Guild Hall on Sept 29
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