Review

Launy Grøndahl
Concerto:

Arranged by Dr. Wade Goodwin


Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Publisher: Cherry Classics Music
Date of Publication: 2023
URL: http://www.cherryclassics.com

Piano score and solo part

Primary Genre: Solo Bass/Contrabass Trombone - with piano

The Concerto for Trombone of Danish composer and conductor Launy Grøndahl (1886–1960) is one of the most popular solo works for tenor trombone. The Concerto has high drama, beautiful melodies, and enough challenges to make it appropriate both for student recitals and professional performances with piano, band, or orchestral accompaniment. The Concerto for Trombone has a complicated publication history. The version for trombone and piano was completed in 1924 and published by G. Ferrario in Milan, Italy. A year later, Grøndahl completed a wind band accompaniment and it was in this incarnation that the Concerto was premiered on June 20, 1925—the composer’s 39th birthday—with trombone soloist Vilhelm Aarkrogh (the Concerto’s dedicatee) and the Tivoli Harmoniorkester, conducted by Ferdinand Hemme. Grøndahl completed the orchestral accompaniment on November 30, 1926. For more information about the compositional history and various accompaniments to the Concerto, readers are referred to the excellent article by Martin Granau, “Launy Grøndahl’s Trombone Concerto Written for Vilhelm Aarkrogh and the Orchestra at the Copenhagen Zoo” (International Trombone Association Journal, Vol. 26, No. 2, Spring 1998).
These three versions continue to be performed today, although Grøndahl’s original wind band accompaniment is, at the present time, presumed lost, and an arrangement for band by Paul Ivan Møller, made in part due to a request for such an arrangement by Carsten Svanberg, is in use today. Many years after the trombone and piano version of the Concerto for Trombone was first published in Italy, it was subsequently reprinted in Copenhagen in 1974. The 1974 edition—the editor’s name does not appear on the publication—made several changes to the piece. These include, most notably, adding the indication, 8va ad lib, over several passages in the second and third movements, as well as adding an additional note to the trombone part in the last measure of the second movement. The custom of taking several passages up an octave began during Grøndahl’s lifetime, but these changes were not authorized by the composer; he was on record about this. After hearing a soloist give a performance with several passages played up an octave, Grøndahl said the performer “simply ruined my Concerto.” This kind of performative grandstanding upsets the balance and shape of the piece. Some other misprints and changes that appeared in the 1974 edition were subsequently corrected in later printings, but the spurious 8va passages persist, and players who wish to restore their Grøndahl Concerto solo part to the composer’s intentions are directed to Per Gade’s article, “An Interview With Thorkild Graae Jörgensen” (International Trombone Association Journal, Vol. 10, No. 2, April 1982), for a list of errata.
Among the interesting aspects of the Concerto is that Grøndahl intended for each of its three movements to have the same pulse. The first movement, Moderato assai ma molto maestoso, is marked quarter note = 80. The second movement, Andante grave: Quasi una Leggenda, is marked eighth note = 80, and the third movement, Maestoso, Allegretto, scherzando: Finale, is marked dotted quarter note = 80. Modern performance practice seems to favor faster tempos. However, when one listens to the recording of the Concerto conducted by Grøndahl from a live performance in 1954 with the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the orchestra’s principal trombonist, Thorkild Graae Jørgensen, we hear even slower tempi, with a pulse closer to 72. (This enlightening recording is available on the CD/mp3/streaming set, “The Launy Grøndahl Legacy, Volume 2, Dancord Records.) Grøndahl, who was resident conductor of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra for 31 years between 1925 and 1956, brings unmistakable credibility to his recording of the Concerto. In his interview with Per Gade, Jørgensen, who played the Concerto under Grøndahl’s baton on many occasions, insisted that the composer was very particular about his tempi and the marked tempo relationships between all three movements. If trombonists can get over the urge to push the tempi faster, they will find the Concerto takes on a very different—and very satisfying—character when performed at the Grøndahl’s marked pulse, or even a little slower as the composer seemed to prefer in performance.
All of this history brings us to this new version of the Concerto by Cherry Classics, arranged and edited by Wade Goodwin for bass trombone and piano. Tenor and bass trombonists have been borrowing music written for other instruments for decades. Bass trombone players, who have a fine and growing repertoire of works composed specifically for bass trombone, have somehow felt the need for arrangements in lower keys of many works that were originally composed for tenor trombone, such as the Concertino of Ferdinand David (transposed from E-flat down to B-flat), and Ernst Sasche’s Concertino (transposed from B-flat down to F). These transcriptions make pieces available to more players but there are always tradeoffs, as when the pedal G-natural in the second movement of David’s Concertino becomes a silly sounding pedal D-natural, and when the piano part descends into the lowest corner of the keyboard.
Still, the idea of a version of Grøndahl’s Concerto transposed down a fifth from the original F minor to B-flat minor proved irresistible for Wade Goodwin, who has previously arranged Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Trombone Concertodown a fourth—also published by Cherry Classics—with “an extended cadenza in the final movement for those who dare to go low.” Never mind that Rimsky-Korsakov’s Concerto as originally conceived has a three octave range from pedal B-flat to high B-flat, well within the range of any capable bass trombonist.
This new version of the Grøndahl Concerto is nicely laid out with clear notation and improved page turns in the solo part over Grøndahl’s original publication for tenor trombone. It is clear that Goodwin worked off the spurious 1974 edition of the Concerto and as a result, he includes the optional passages to be taken up an octave that Grøndahl did not sanction. These 8va passages make even less sense in this lower version, and players should also leave the final measure of the second movement as a rest for the soloist rather than adding an additional pedal G-natural to end the movement. Goodwin has sensibly left out some of the left hand octave doubling in the piano part that the lower key would have demanded in a strict transcription of the original version, a decision that keeps the accompaniment from getting too murky. A collision between the titles of the second and third movements with the header of those pages is the only careless layout issue.
I do have a quibble. The arrangement is published as Launy Grøndahl’s “Concerto for Bass Trombone with Piano Accompaniment.” It is not. It is Grøndahl’s “Concerto for Trombone, arranged for Bass Trombone with Piano Accompaniment.” This is no small thing. As transcriptions proliferate, we do well to avoid confusion that results when compositions are given new titles.
For bass trombonists who have longed to play Grøndahl’s Concerto in a lower key rather than work on one’s high register and play the original, here is a mostly sensibly rendered arrangement. Whether, on principle, one thinks making these kinds of transcriptions is a good idea is a decision for each performer. That said, given how trombonists have, over the years,  borrowed music from just about every instrument, from Telemann’s Flute Fantasies, to Bach’s Cello Suites, and John Williams’ Tuba Concerto, all seems to be fair when it comes to musical appropriation.