When Dani Howard first mooted the idea of a concerto to Peter Moore, LSO Principal Trombone, Covid-19 was yet to strike. By the time she began writing the piece, in the summer of 2020, concert halls were silent and many of Howard’s musician colleagues had doggedly set up shop online. Meanwhile the everyday heroics of bus drivers, refuse workers and community organisers were finally getting the recognition they deserved. Howard’s Trombone Concerto is a celebration of these people – and their resolve during the pandemic provides its emotional arc.
In the first movement, the humming rhythms of day-to-day life (embodied in the solo trombone’s instruction to ‘play as if you are totally oblivious to your surroundings’) are displaced by a gradual ‘Realisation’ – a way to contribute, perhaps, or a sense of one’s own worth. This seed of an idea is turned over and over in the second movement, ‘Rumination’. Here, over a repeating harmonic cycle, the initially unaccompanied trombone is joined in stages by sections of the orchestra, its confidence growing with every new exchange. Then comes the ecstatic finale, an ‘Illumination’ in which the soloist’s resolve is borne out in a burst of fireworks.
Read the full programme note and profile on the London Symphony Orchestra website