Review

Nathaniel Shilkret
Concerto for Trombone:

Arranged by Jim Pugh, Anthony Patterson, and Bryan Free/keyboard Nathaniel Shilkret


Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Publisher: Cherry Classics Music
Date of Publication: 1942 / 2025
URL: http://www.cherryclassics.com

Piano score and solo part

Primary Genre: Solo Tenor Trombone - with piano

On Thursday afternoon, February 15, 1945, as the United States was still deeply engaged in World War II, Tommy Dorsey stepped onto the stage of New York’s City Center not as the leader of one of America’s most famous dance bands but as trombone soloist with Leopold Stokowski and the New York City Symphony. The occasion was a children’s concert—The New York Times reported the next day that 1,500 children attended—and the moment could hardly have been more charged. The Yalta Conference had ended only four days earlier; the Battle of the Bulge was barely three weeks past; Allied bombers were completing their devastating raids on Dresden; and in the Pacific, Manila was still being fought over while Iwo Jima lay only days ahead. At home, Americans were still living with ration books and wartime restrictions, while Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s City Center embodied a civic conviction that the performing arts were not a luxury, even in wartime. Into that atmosphere came the world premiere of Nathaniel Shilkret’s Concerto for Trombone, a work steeped in jazz and popular-music idioms that was commissioned by one of swing’s most celebrated trombonists. Its placement on a program that also included Isaac Albéniz’s “El Corpus Christi en Sevilla” from Iberia, Alexander Scriabin’s Prelude No. 10 in C-sharp minor, excerpts from Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, and William Schuman’s Side Show—later titled Circus Overture—was more than a novelty. It was a striking bit of programming: a wartime children’s concert in which the trombone was invited to stand at the front of the stage, speaking in a language at once symphonic, popular, and unmistakably American.

For trombonists, Shilkret’s Concerto for Trombone is the stuff of legend. Long known from a live recording of its premiere, the printed music itself remained tantalizingly inaccessible for over 60 years. I recall reading about the Concerto in the early 1980s in a biography of Leopold Stokowski. A vigorous search to locate the Concerto at that time—before the internet and email—proved futile. Happily, the Concerto is now available to rent in its orchestra and concert band accompaniment versions, and the composer’s own piano reduction—the subject of this review—has been published by CherryClassics. This is a major event in trombone music publishing, and now that it is widely accessible, Shilkret’s Concerto can finally take its rightful place not only as one of the great trombone concertos by an American composer, but as one of the finest pieces written for the instrument. Ever.

Born in 1889 in Queens, New York City, Nathaniel “Nat” Shilkret served as music director for the Victor Talking Machine Company in New York. There, he recorded thousands of 78 rpm records and radio programs as a conductor, clarinetist, composer, and arranger. Shilkret was conversant in a wide range of compositional styles, including his hit songs “Lady Divine” and “Jeannine, I Dream of Lilac Time.” In 1935, he moved to Los Angeles and worked as a composer, arranger, and conductor for RKO Studios in Hollywood, contributing to over thirty film scores. He was also the driving force behind Genesis Suite (1945), a collaborative work for narrator, chorus, and orchestra that set episodes from the Bible’s first book. In addition to Shilkret himself, Arnold Schoenberg, Alexandre Tansman, Darius Milhaud, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Ernst Toch, and Igor Stravinsky each contributed one movement.

Some of the story of Shilkret’s Concerto for Trombone and the quest to locate, perform, and publish it in our modern era was told by the late Bryan Free, formerly of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, in his ITA Journal article, “Nathaniel Shilkret’s Trombone Concerto: The Rediscovery Process” (Vol. 29, No. 1, Winter 2001, 32–41). The tale reads like a detective thriller, and Free’s tenacious efforts to find the music leave trombonists in his debt. This was a man who did not take “no” for an answer, one who followed breadcrumb trails to many dead ends before finally locating Shilkret’s daughter-in-law, Barbara Shilkret, and his grandson, Niel Shell. Free’s telling of the story—Jim Pugh (who also play an important part in the Shilkret Concerto narrative) refers to him as a “musical archaeologist”—brings in not only Dorsey and Stokowski but also Hoyt Bohannon, who gave the second performance of the Concerto on July 28, 1945, with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra conducted by Stokowski, and Will Bradley, whose 1947 recording of the Concerto in a reduced orchestration was never released. Davis Shuman, who in 1961 was happy to hear that Shilkret had arranged the Concerto with band accompaniment (a hoped-for performance of the Concerto with Shuman and The Goldman Band never materialized), also makes an appearance in this tangled tale, as does the young Robert E. Gray (ITA President from 1984–1986), who in 1950, while working on his doctoral dissertation at the Eastman School of Music, reached out to Shilkret for information about the Concerto and received a lengthy reply that Free included in his article.

At the time of publication of his ITA Journal article, Bryan Free had not yet been able to organize a performance of the Concerto, but that finally took place in Carnegie Hall, New York, on January 17, 2003, with Jim Pugh as trombone soloist with the New York Pops Orchestra conducted by Skitch Henderson. Pugh recorded the Concerto with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jeff Tyzik in July 2004, as part of his superb CD release X Over Trombone (along with concertos by Pugh and Tyzik, Albany Records TROY926), and the following month, Christian Lindberg recorded the Concerto with the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra conducted by John Neschling (BIS-SACD-1448). My extensive review of X Over Trombone appeared in the Online Trombone Journal (trombone.org, March 12, 2008, where I also compared Pugh’s and Lindberg’s recordings of Shilkret’s Concerto), and the ITA Journal (Vol. 36, No. 3, July 2008).

The Concerto defies pigeonholing. As I wrote in 2008, “It is a 22-minute romp, a ‘period piece’ to be sure, with all of the best elements of 1940s pseudo-pop-semi-classical music. At times you feel you are transported to the Land of Oz, with the finest of 1930s and 40s Hollywood soundtrack writing blowing at its back. The second movement is so evocative that you can practically see (and even smell) the smoke-filled room in which the trombone aches with memories. And one has to smile when hearing Shilkret’s direct quotation of ‘I’m Getting Sentimental Over You,’ surely no accidental tribute to Dorsey. And what to make of the stunning first movement cadenza, with its lengthy passage of multiphonics (which Dorsey did not play in his performance)? Genre shattering? You bet.”

The piano reduction published by CherryClassics is, as the introduction by Pugh indicates, by Shilkret. However, some passages in his piano score covered three staves, like a short score for a conductor. For this publication, Anthony Patterson edited those passages for two-hand piano and made some other passages more workable for the accompanist. CherryClassics is up to its usual high standard in presenting an excellent edition that is clean and crisp, with sensible page turns in both the piano and trombone solo parts. A bonus is the inclusion of the trombone solo part for Shilkret’s version of the Concerto with concert band accompaniment, which, at Dorsey’s suggestion, incorporates numerous changes in the first movement as compared with the original orchestra version, including omission of the multiphonics passage. The publication also contains information on how one can rent the orchestra or band version.

The Concerto requires a player of considerable ability who is conversant in both classical trombone techniques and a more popular, commercial style of playing. With a range from pedal BB-flat up to d2, its passages of rapid, staccato sixteenth notes, smooth ballad style, boogie-woogie swing, and a lengthy cadenza with rapidly slurred arpeggios and multiphonics, the Concerto is worth every bit of effort required to give it a successful performance. Now that the trombone solo parts and piano reduction have been published—and the orchestra and band accompaniments are available for rental—the Concerto can take its place on recital programs, juries, and concerto competitions, and more performances with large ensembles won’t be far behind. The tenacious efforts of Bryan Free and Jim Pugh, combined with the generosity of the Shilkret family in finally making the music widely available, are well rewarded by CherryClassics and its fine edition, and we are all the happy beneficiaries of their joint work in bringing this masterpiece to the marketplace. Highly recommended.