GRAMOPHONE Review: MOVE The Trumpet As Movie Star – Romain Leleu, Stuttgart Philharmonic Orchestra/Bosch

You might describe this entertaining disc as trumpeting (apologies) the extraordinary talents of Romain Leleu through a medium well used to making a star of his chosen instrument. And where else would you start in this celebration of the silver screen and the music that has graced it than with Nino Rota’s hugely evocative Godfather theme. Bathed as it is in Sicilian sunlight and sentimentality, its aching nostalgia has ‘epic’ written all over it. And all that conveyed through one plaintive voice, a solo trumpet, nothing else.

Small wonder they called the disc ‘The Trumpet as Movie Star’ – because it does precisely what it says on that particular tin and spirits us through a kind of audio collage of familiar and less familiar movie morsels. They’ve even mixed in some atmospheric flecks of actual soundtrack to carry us from scene to scene, movie to movie. And mood to mood – because Leleu is a stylistic chameleon of the first order and flits here between jazz combo and symphony orchestra, jamming with the best of them in cues like Louis Malle’s Lift to the Scaffold with its Miles Davis improvised super noir-ish soundtrack or Michel Legrand’s Les Damoiselles de Rochefort. We even have an Irving Berlin classic ‘Cheek to Cheek’ from Top Hat (replete with a slightly dubious vocal from Sloe) prompting memories of Louis Armstrong and that Mancini gem ‘Moon River’ which sits so well for the solo trumpet at its smoothest and most urban.

But for me the trumpet is that lone stranger – the Edward Hopperesque bugle of Polanski’s Chinatown courtesy of Jerry Goldsmith or the floridly Italianate Mariachi-style wailing of Ennio Morricone’s A Fistful of Dollars – and it is that quality that is infused into the original new work in this collection: Babtiste Trotignon’s MOVE.

Trotignon’s concerto plays like a storyboard in three movements. Underscoring in search of a movie, you might say. And there’s plenty for Leleu to get his embouchure around. I especially like the slow movement lament. Again very noir-ish and with a lonely plaintive quality such as one finds in Copland’s Quiet City or Ives’ Unanswered Question.

So trumpet junkies and movie fanatics are going to find something to satisfy their habit here. Romain Leleu is the real deal, no question.