“You have to find your limits without destroying yourself. That is what most of us trumpet players have to keep in mind when practising and playing in concert.”
This was the advice the master-class students of Michael Gross got on Good Friday.
The master-class as well as a May 5 concert were organised and sponsored by the Goethe Institute Internationals and Classic FM Radio.
Several students from Sofia and the countryside participated in the master-class. Among them were beginners – like 13-year-old Bojidar who has played the trumpet for only four months and won the admiration of his colleagues, as well as students from the Music Academy, accompanied by their teacher, Professor Makedonski.
Before engaging in interpretation, Gross taught basic techniques for warm up and enlarging the range of the trumpet. The last session was dedicated to the manner of playing classic authors like Hummel, Kurz and Tomasi.
Gross was born in Illingen, Saarland in 1976. He started playing the trumpet at the age of nine and got a classical education.
Among his teachers were M. Enders in Saarbruecken and R. Friedrich in Karlsruhe. His main interest stays with contemporary music, which led him to collaboration with Frank Zappa, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gyoergy Ligeti, Vinko Globokar, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
He made his name as improviser playing with Butch Morris’ Berlin Skyscraper Orchestra, Joe Williamson, Frank Schulte, Elliot Sharp and many others.
Gross is also a well-known jazz interpreter.
With the group SwimTwoBirds he played in Sofia at the Eurojazz festival last year. Sharing some of his experience with the students he showed them that no matter what kind of music you play, the basics are the same.
“Trumpet playing is like singing. As a matter of fact we sing through the trumpet using our lips instead of our vocal chords, and that is the main difference between us and the singers.”
His enthusiasm about all kinds of music was sincere. The relaxed atmosphere that was created by Gross made the students feel comfortable and give their best. The interpretation-lesson was a piece of art, which must have deeply influenced the participants.
No matter what one might think about trumpet and trumpet players, Gross proved that classical as well as contemporary music could be equally interesting.
On Sunday evening he played the Telemann Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra. The precise sound of his piccolo trumpet as well as his exact feeling of the style pleased the audience.
The second work he played was a world premiere. It was written especially for this occasion by Bernd Thewes, a friend and colleague of Gross, with whom he has been working for many years. They went to the same school in Saarland and later on their paths in search of new horizons in contemporary music crossed many times.
The piece played that evening is called Reissende Zeit, which is a play of words and translated means “The time that is cut (cuts us) into pieces”, and read in a different way also means “Travelling Time”.
As Thewes said, it is an experimental piece in which he has used citations from Bartok, who in his turn has used Bulgarian songs for this particular work. Thematically and by means of interpretation this piece of 18 minutes was quite unusual. The instruments, besides the trumpet and the “normal” orchestra instruments, included loudspeakers and a tape-recorder, hidden in two drums. This gave the opportunity of creating different delay, echo and repetition effects. It was a real cutting of the time indeed.
Styles and epochs as well as the play of the musicians were cut into pieces in order to make a new whole, which could be seen as a musical interpretation of our post-modern lives.
This was the advice the master-class students of Michael Gross got on Good Friday.
The master-class as well as a May 5 concert were organised and sponsored by the Goethe Institute Internationals and Classic FM Radio.
Several students from Sofia and the countryside participated in the master-class. Among them were beginners – like 13-year-old Bojidar who has played the trumpet for only four months and won the admiration of his colleagues, as well as students from the Music Academy, accompanied by their teacher, Professor Makedonski.
Before engaging in interpretation, Gross taught basic techniques for warm up and enlarging the range of the trumpet. The last session was dedicated to the manner of playing classic authors like Hummel, Kurz and Tomasi.
Gross was born in Illingen, Saarland in 1976. He started playing the trumpet at the age of nine and got a classical education.
Among his teachers were M. Enders in Saarbruecken and R. Friedrich in Karlsruhe. His main interest stays with contemporary music, which led him to collaboration with Frank Zappa, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gyoergy Ligeti, Vinko Globokar, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
He made his name as improviser playing with Butch Morris’ Berlin Skyscraper Orchestra, Joe Williamson, Frank Schulte, Elliot Sharp and many others.
Gross is also a well-known jazz interpreter.
With the group SwimTwoBirds he played in Sofia at the Eurojazz festival last year. Sharing some of his experience with the students he showed them that no matter what kind of music you play, the basics are the same.
“Trumpet playing is like singing. As a matter of fact we sing through the trumpet using our lips instead of our vocal chords, and that is the main difference between us and the singers.”
His enthusiasm about all kinds of music was sincere. The relaxed atmosphere that was created by Gross made the students feel comfortable and give their best. The interpretation-lesson was a piece of art, which must have deeply influenced the participants.
No matter what one might think about trumpet and trumpet players, Gross proved that classical as well as contemporary music could be equally interesting.
On Sunday evening he played the Telemann Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra. The precise sound of his piccolo trumpet as well as his exact feeling of the style pleased the audience.
The second work he played was a world premiere. It was written especially for this occasion by Bernd Thewes, a friend and colleague of Gross, with whom he has been working for many years. They went to the same school in Saarland and later on their paths in search of new horizons in contemporary music crossed many times.
The piece played that evening is called Reissende Zeit, which is a play of words and translated means “The time that is cut (cuts us) into pieces”, and read in a different way also means “Travelling Time”.
As Thewes said, it is an experimental piece in which he has used citations from Bartok, who in his turn has used Bulgarian songs for this particular work. Thematically and by means of interpretation this piece of 18 minutes was quite unusual. The instruments, besides the trumpet and the “normal” orchestra instruments, included loudspeakers and a tape-recorder, hidden in two drums. This gave the opportunity of creating different delay, echo and repetition effects. It was a real cutting of the time indeed.
Styles and epochs as well as the play of the musicians were cut into pieces in order to make a new whole, which could be seen as a musical interpretation of our post-modern lives.
