Trumpet Concertos of Haydn, Hummel, Torelli, and Bellini

It's amazing when you consider that the world's greatest trumpet concerto was composed in 1796. The truth is, we're lucky Haydn's manuscript survived at all. The only reason he wrote the piece in the first place was because of the invention of a keyed trumpet that permitted the full range of notes to be played on the instrument for the very first time. But trumpet concertos don't really interest modern composers to any large degree because of the expressive limitations of the instrument itself. During the Baroque and Classical periods, composers basically took the trumpet and did everything they could with it. As this excellently played disc proves, it was quite a lot. -- David Hurwitz