Frédéric Talgorn

Concerto

At the end of the 1980s, the trumpeter Thierry Caens asked me to write a concerto for him; I accepted this proposal with great enthusiasm, but also, I must confess, with a certain amount of nervousness. Although I already had some modest experience of writing for trumpet in an orchestral context, composing a trumpet concerto - especially for a soloist of this caliber - was a completely different task and presented a considerable challenge. I set out to highlight Thierry's virtuosity and lyrical playing, qualities I had already learned to appreciate in recordings of some of my film scores. My readings at the time focused on the initiation rites of ancient Greece, which inspired several elements of the work: its tripartite nature, the percussive "bacchanale" of the third movement, and the original title Mysteria, which was abandoned during two revisions of the score, in 2016 and 2025. The 2025 revision was made on the occasion of the publication by Editions Marc Reift and is now the final version. The entire work is conceived around various iterations of a particular triad (e.g. Cmaj7sus2), which gives rise to melodic motifs that refer to it more or less directly. The concerto was premiered on March 28, 1991 by Thierry Caens at the Théâtre de Dijon under the direction of Jean-Sébastien Béreau.