Sheet music
- Download score (.pdf, 1.8 Meg)
- Download original solo part, for trumpet in C (.pdf, 400k)
- Download solo part, transposed for trumpet in Bb (.pdf, 400k)
- Download piano reduction (.pdf, 700k)
About the concerto. It began at the Lord Dudley pub in Eastern Sydney. Anthony Heinrichs (a member of the Sydney Symphony) was having a beer with members of the Woollahra Orchestra (a community orchestra), who asked him to perform a concerto with them. Haydn? Hummel? proposed Anthony No, they said, none of these soloist-plus-strings concertos; a big concerto, with full wind, brass and percussion. (Including tuba! added Nigel) Get Joe to write one.
For the first performance, there was no thought of a harp - Woollahra didn't have one. And the concerto still gets performed without one. For a later performance, however, Marjorie Maydwell was going to play some Tchaikovsky with the orchestra so she asked: Where's my part? She's a great player so I wrote her a big solo part, prominent in the cadenzas. The saxophone is also prominent, and it introduces the second theme (my musical 'signature': 9-8-5): that's because they invited me to play sax at the first concert. The piece is tonal, with tone clusters, especially in the cadenzas, and some harmonies reflecting my background in jazz. The excitement comes from syncopation and changing time signatures like 7:8 and 10:8. There are some big tunes that you may end up remembering and, as requested, it has plenty of brass and percussion - including a tuba solo that introduces the first theme in bar 1.
