The picture of the middle-aged French trumpet pedagogue
Guy Touvron on the cover of this disc is misleading, for the program combines two much earlier recordings; one was made in 1970, when
Touvron was all of 20 years old, and the other, sonically quite distinct despite the identical recording location and subsequent digital remastering, was done five years later. They were recordings made during the first wave of Baroque music's popularity, and they contained a few hits: the Fanfare from Jean-Baptiste Mouret's Suite des symphonies, Book 2, No. 1 is better known as the theme to television's Masterpiece Theater. The "Baroque trumpet" referred to in the album title is simply Baroque music for trumpet; the trumpet involved is not a valveless Baroque instrument. These recordings were probably inspired by the success of
Maurice André's recordings of Baroque trumpet music, which showed the world how festive Baroque music for trumpet and organ could be;
Touvron, who wrote a biography of
André, plays in the same bright, slightly tempo-pushing style. The chief justification for reissuing these performances seems to be the varied program, which runs from the sixteenth century to the late eighteenth and touches on several composers who still haven't been much heard from. The Purcell, Delalande, and Mouret selections have been done better elsewhere, but what of the unusual German "city music" of Johann Christoph Pezel (1639-1694), with their charming straightforwardness, or the lightweight early Classical-period trumpet-and-organ sonata of Carlo Tessarini, in which the festive quality of the trumpet-organ combination runs up against the dictates of easy, natural melody? They're not essential masterpieces, but the program is varied and never dull.
Touvron commanded the trumpet with technical ease even at this early date, and the disc in general holds up better than many from the 1970s Baroque wave. Extensive liner notes, drawn rather methodically from the New Grove Dictionary, are given in English and French.