Jeroen Berwaerts & Konstantin Shamray (City Recital Hall Presents)

Hindemith and Gershwin rub shoulders with Chet Baker in an evening of true virtuosity from performers in perfect sync. 

City Recital Hall, Sydney

Reviewed on 18 September, 2023

by Steve Moffatt on 19 September, 2023

Sydney recently played host to Wynton Marsalis, a musical superstar who made history by taking out two Grammies in the same year — one for jazz and the other for his classical recording of the Haydn trumpet concertos.

But there is another trumpeter who successfully bestrides the two genres: the Belgian virtuoso Jeroen Berwaerts, Principal Trumpet of the NDR Radio Symphony Hamburg and member of fabled Canadian Brass and Stockholm Chamber Brass ensembles. Here he presented a brilliant and fascinating program accompanied by Australian-based Russian pianist Konstantin Shamray in the gorgeous acoustic of Sydney’s City Recital Hall.

Berwaerts came late to the classical stage, having started off in brass bands, jazz and funk groups. “I hadn’t listened to any real classical music before I was 18!” he admits.

This accounts for his eclectic approach to solo performances where the likes of Henry Purcell and Paul Hindemith rub shoulders with Chet Baker and Duke Ellington.

His philosophy is refreshingly simple: “Music is music. This is how we widen our audience, putting good pieces alongside each other.” And judging from this one-off concert the recipe works a treat.

Of course, it helps to have an equally talented partner in Shamray, who exploded on to the concert scene in 2008 when he won the Sydney International Piano Competition. He chose two pieces by Maurice Ravel – “Ondine” from Gaspard de la nuit and Pavane pour une infante défunte – for his solos and, as if confirmation were needed, showed himself to be one of the most simpatico accompanists in Australia today.

Berwaerts opened the concert in style with the arresting upward glissando of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, showing his faultless technique and golden tone with cleanly articulated runs, bluesy slides and effortless trills before switching to a mute. Shamray’s vamping piano set up a rocking pulse while the Belgian unleashed an array of effects, adding layers, textures and colours to Gershwin’s big hit.

Coincidentally I had been listening earlier in the day to a new album by the late Chick Corea on which he plays this piece, giving it plenty of swing and telling his live audience that Gershwin was a jazz composer first and foremost. Both he and the creator of Porgy and Bess would have enjoyed this collaboration.

After Shamray’s smooth and delicate touch for the harp-like arpeggios of Ravel’s “Ondine”, Berwaerts gave the Australian premiere of a piece by Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa, Im Nebel, a 2013 work inspired by Hermann Hesse’s poem in which the trumpet represents man and the piano nature and the mist that surrounds it.

Over the slightly ominous opening bass chords the muted trumpet tracks a sinewy path, but as things become more agitated, off comes the mute and up goes the volume. Then the mood changes back to a foggy quiet. At one stage Berwaerts removed the mouthpiece, singing into the instrument with great effect.

His treatment of Rodgers and Hart’s My Funny Valentine, immortalised by Chet Baker, was given the fully instrumental treatment after he turned his back to the audience and blew his trumpet gently into the guts of the Steinway, setting up a slight resonance from the strings. After some variations on the familiar tune it segued into a Georges Enescu’s Légende, featuring some piano work worthy of Rachmaninov and muscular brass before dying away to a muted fadeout.

Berwaerts practises yoga to maintain his strength and breath control, and both of these were put to maximum use in the longest work on the program, Hindemith’s Sonata for Trumpet and Piano, a wide-ranging work over three movements with a heroic opening, full of nervous energy from Shamray, building in intensity with perfectly held high notes which prompted some premature applause. The substantial third movement has moments of stark grandeur reminiscent of some of Shostakovich’s wartime chamber works.

In all it is a terrific work which I had not heard before and it left me wanting to hear more like it.

After Shamray’s somewhat restrained and cool rendition of Ravel’s Pavane the pair showed their Absurdist theatrical chops in György Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre, an extract from the Hungarian’s “anti-anti opera” La Grande Macabre. This was by turns hilarious and disturbing, with Shamray juggling the keyboard with maracas, a whistle, staccato dialogue and manic laughter while Berwaerts showed burlesque skills, comically sinking to the floor at one stage as his trumpet let out its dying gasps.

This was an evening of true virtuosity from two performers in perfect sync with each other, along with a spark of showmanship and theatre.