Concert Suite from The Polar Express
Title: Concert Suite from The Polar Express - Grade 4
Composer: Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard
Arranger: Jerry Brubaker
Publisher: https://www.jwpepper.com/The-Polar-Express/2479944.item
My performance rating: A- with an "*"
So far this has been the hardest piece to get a single clean take of that I have recorded to date. I struggle with consistency, hitting every note, every time and this piece is just a nightmare trumpet part to achieve that. The opening seems easy enough, half notes over more than half the 1st page. But the interval jumps for me are just tough to get right each time without splitting or chipping something along the way. The 2nd page of the piece isn't too bad, slow, pretty, in a very comfortable range after you get through a couple tricky high note areas that are easy to chip if your embouchure isn't setup properly. The 3rd page however I only got reasonably close on one take out of maybe a dozen or more. What made it worse is getting through page 1 and 2 reasonably well only to have a catastrophic failure on page 3 - very frustrating. The interval jumps are really bad as the piece comes to its climactic finish and it is in the uppermost register with optional high "Ds" and a high E which of course I had to play. Funny, I was so shocked that I got the ending very close to right, I came in early on one of the last entrances.
*Since I didn't get a single good run, I decided to expand my video editing skills to see if I could marry the best take I had of the beginning with the only good take I had of the ending. The following video is the result. I would have tried more to get it right but after 2 days of an hour long recording session on this one piece, my wife finally texted me from across the house and asked "how many times are you going to play that song". LOL - I had had enough too!
I also experimented with a couple different microphone settings which is why you might notice a slight difference in the recording tambour when you see it switch.