Harrogate Festival and Mute madness!

Last week Bella Tromba travelled up to the lovely spa town of Harrogate in North Yorkshire to take part in the Harrogate International Festival. Steve Burke joined us again on percussion.
Having percussion with us once more gave us another chance to play the fantastic ‘Telos 135′ by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies which we played in our recital at Deal Festival a few weeks ago. We also played two brand new pieces which we commissioned especially for this recital. One was a medley of Cole Porter songs for four trumpets and vibraphone arranged by Gavin Broom and the other was an arrangement of folk tunes and songs from the time of Purcell by Ross Brown called ‘Booze, Ballads and Bloodshed’.
Ross’ piece used two piccolo trumpets and a flugel horn and pretty much every mute there is for the trumpet! Ever since the quartet has formed we have talked about using matching mutes as all the different makes of mute make slightly different sounds. Ideally a group or section in an orchestra should use matching mutes to really get the sounds to blend. Despite much talking about it we never got round to it until we met Stephen Wick of ‘Denis Wick Mutes’. Stephen believes very strongly in groups all playing on the same mutes so when he found out we were playing on a motley assortment of mutes, offered to sponsor us and kit the quartet out with new mutes. Handily this all happened weeks before our Harrogate recital so we managed to fit in a trip to the Denis Wick warehouse and left with as many mutes as we could carry and a few more!