Next up is the Burrill Phillips trumpet trio. I found exactly one recording of this trio and it's got some tuning issues, but I can hear the potential in the arrangement so I wanted to dig in a little bit. The piece definitely covers the whole range of the horn and mostly satisfies that requirement in every trumpet part. I can hear that the amount of melodic and harmonic work is distributed between the three parts, but there are some excessively long phrases that sound pretty exhausting and lead to some of the aforementioned tuning issues.
The middle muted movement is, in my opinion, very cool. While two parts ostinati, a solo voice sings on top of them. This kind of texture is easy to make boring, but it can also create suspense and give listeners a feeling of 'groundedness' to latch on to when things get a little weird. The scherzo-like third movement is excellent as well.
Overall, this piece is very dense. At over 9 minutes it rivals a lot of solo literature for pure exhaustion quotient. If I got a hold of the trio I would be interested in tweaking some of the distribution of challenges to make things a little more even between parts. There are some repetitions in each movement that could be clipped as well to get the run time closer to seven minutes. That might be in poor taste, but there's so few good trumpet trios I feel compelled to want to shine up the few gems I can find.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcvVeXDr1qo
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