Daniel de Gruchy Lambert

Age: 15yrs
From: Machen
Daniel was born into a musical family in 1988 and lives in Machen, South Wales, with his parents and his sister, Aimée. He began playing the cornet aged 8, after hearing the sound of the trumpet in church. Showing promise on both cornet and piano, he won a place in the junior department of the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama; at the age of 10 he switched to the trumpet with Gareth Rees as his teacher. Three months later he passed an audition for the National Children’s Orchestra of Great Britain, becoming Principal Trumpet at 11.

He passed his Grade 8 with distinction the same year. Daniel won scholarships to all three top specialist music schools and spent a year at Wells Cathedral School before returning to Wales to further his trumpet studies with Philippe Schartz, Principal Trumpet with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. While studying with Philippe, Daniel came second in the International Trumpet Guild’s youth competition in 2002; the following year he won the Texaco Young Musician of Wales and Rotary International Young Musician of the Year competitions.

Daniel now studies with James Watson, Head of Brass at the Royal Academy of Music in London, to which he travels every fortnight while continuing his schoolwork in Wales. Daniel has successfully auditioned for the National Youth Orchestras of Great Britain and Wales, and played with the Cambrensis Orchestra and local county youth orchestras.

As a result of winning Texaco Young Musician of Wales, Daniel has played the Haydn and Arutiunian concertos with the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra, and performed in St David’s Praise at St David’s Hall, Cardiff, with the Cambrensis Orchestra in May 2003. He has also recently performed the Vivaldi Double Concerto with the Cambrensis Orchestra. Daniel regularly performs in charity recitals with his sister and takes every opportunity he is given to perform, seeing it as a real privilege. Daniel would like to make a career out of playing his trumpet. As well as classical music, his musical tastes range from Shostakovich to Miles Davis and jazz to Dilated Peoples and Hip Hop. He loves to dabble in composition and improvisation and, when he has time, to busk.
Daniel's choice of work for the Concerto Final:
Alexander Arutiunian (born 1920)
Trumpet Concerto in A flat major (1950)
Although little-known in this country, Alexander Arutiunian is one of the leading 20th-century Armenian composers, devoting most of his life to working in his native Yerevan. He attended the Conservatory of Music there, graduating in 1941, and in the 1970s returned as Professor of Composition. As a member of the generation of composers which followed in the footsteps of the internationally celebrated Armenian figure of Aram Khachaturian it is perhaps inevitable that Arutiunian and others have remained in his shadow.

The political climate of the 1940s and 1950s in Russia when Arutiunian came to maturity also imposed notorious creative restrictions on composers. A period of study in Moscow in the late 1940s will have made Arutiunian aware at close-hand of the terrifying decree issued in 1948 by Stalin’s henchman, the cultural commissar Andrey Zhdanov, against ‘formalism’ in music and its merciless attack on Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Khachaturian himself. Indeed, Arutiunian seemed to comply so readily with official state policy that he won the Stalin Prize in 1949.

Not surprisingly, therefore, Arutiunian’s Trumpet Concerto of 1950 is unashamedly traditional in style but no less effective for that. Cast as an extended single movement lasting a little less than 20 minutes, the solo trumpet is introduced immediately over a dramatic undertow of tremolando basses with timpani and evocative horn-calls. This prelude appropriately gives the soloist pride of place and sets the stage effectively. Things soon settle down with a cheerful main theme which will remind many of the ‘popular’ style of Kabalevsky and Khachaturian – tuneful and catchy, it is perfectly suited to the trumpet, and the orchestra is happy to support.

The mood changes for a languid clarinet solo full of nostalgia and sentiment. When the trumpet comes to sing this tune a whiff of jazz creeps round the door and adds to the evocative atmosphere. After some lively development the music retreats again and a ‘slow movement’ is beautifully unfolded within the structure with muted trumpet singing out poignantly as if in a sublimated film score. A quick change of gear and the concerto ends with a reminder of its first tune followed by an extended cadenza which ends emphatically.
Programme note © Geraint Lewis