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Maurice
André "le grand trompettiste de notre
temps"
Background
Maurice André
was born May 21th, 1933, into a miner's family in Ales in the
Cevennes. His father was an amateur trumpet player and a great music
lover. He played in the small villages and one day he came back with an
old cornet. Maurice who then was 12 ½ years old had done his
solfeggio for two years. He
fell in love with the instrument:
His father also did a great thing when he sent Maurice to study with a friend of his, Monsieur Leon Barthélémy who had studied at the Paris Conservatory under Professor Merri Franquin (1848-1934).
With Barthélémy, Maurice
had to buy method books like Arban and as he says:
Student at the
Paris Conservatory (1951 - 1953)
After 4 years study,
Barthélémy told his father that he had to get Maurice,
who then was working in the mine,
to Paris to study at the Conservatory. But being a miner he could not
afford
that. Then Barthélémy got the idea that Maurice
should
try to become a member of a military band. Soon after, Maurice
was
in Mont-Valerien with the 8th regiment. At the Conservatory you could
get
a free place as member of a military band. At 18, in 1951, Maurice left
the mine
and
entered the Paris Conservatory in the class of Professor Raymond
Sabarich (1909-1966).
On photos from that time one can see
Maurice in the trumpet class in a military uniform.
It was not an easy time in Paris without
any money, a son of a miner. He always ate at the barracks, and
studied in the barracks too. Raymond Sabarich soon discovered that this
young miner was a great talent and he gave Maurice a "lesson" that he
recall in this way in an interview:
3 months after my arrival in Paris, a good lad from the south and all that, Sabarich gave me a real piece of his mind. He had felt straight away that I was gifted, as is said, and so he loaded me with work… and I didn't deliver the goods as he wished. After 3 months he threw abuse at me and chucked me out of the class. Before his death - poor man - Sabarich always said: "lt's when Maurice André woke up.'' How a good scolding does one good occasionally !After 3 months with a lot of practice, Maurice returned and played all the 14 etudes from Arban (in the back of the book) without making any mistakes. After only 6 months of work in Paris, studying the cornet, he won the first prize (1952). The next year (1953), he won the first prize for trumpet.
The prizewinner
In 1955 he won the first prize at the
Geneva
International Competition. In 1963 when he was 30 years old he was
asked to become a member of the jury in the "Internationalen Wettbewerb
in München". He then
discovered that he could take part in the competition and he did and
won
the first prize.
The orchestral
musician
André played in
major French orchestras such as Philharmonique
del la R.T.F (the Paris Radio Orchestra) (1953
-1962), Orchestre
des Concerts Lamoureux (1953
-1960), and the orchestra of the Opéra-Comique
in Paris (1962 -1967). He also played in smaller more
jazz-oriented groups.
The solo artist
The prize in 1963 was the start of his
solo career.
A very important person for his solo
career was a girl he met in Montreux in Suisse, Liliane. 6 months after
they met, they got married.
Liliane saw the potential he had and
became his manager and companion on his tours. When Maurice started out
as a soloist there were very little music for trumpet and the trumpet
was not considered a solo instrument like the violin, oboe and some of
the other instruments. To add to the repertoire, Maurice transcribed
solo concerts for violin, oboe
and other instruments. He also started using the piccolo trumpet. Today
there
are more than 130 transcriptions for the piccolo trumpet and some of
the
pieces, like the Tartini Concerto in D major for Trumpet and Orchestra
(originally
for violin), transcribed by Jean Thilde is very popular and several
trumpet
artists are performing it now.
Maurice André has toured all over
the world and played with a lot of the great conductors and great
orchestras. In an interview 20 years ago (in 1978) he told Jean-Pierre
Mathéz that he did 220 concerts that year and an average of 180
so that up to 1978 he must have done more than 2700 concerts.
The trumpet
teacher
André succeeded his
teacher Raymond Sabarich (who died in 1966) as a professor of trumpet
at the Paris Conservatory in 1967. Like Sabarich he continued the
class-teaching tradition of the Conservatory. About this tradition André said the following (see ITG Journal
1976 - Opinions of Contemporary
European Trumpet Players) to a question from Norman E. Smith:
The recording artist
Pictures
Sound sample (in RealAudio)
The piccolo
trumpet
Composer and musician Jan Leontsky has written an article
where he call Maurice André
"the father of the piccolo trumpet" (le père de la trompette
piccolo).
In 1959 the Selmer Company started
making a piccolo trumpet (with 3 valves). In the following years, many
technical improvements came (a 4th valve added in 1967) in close
collaboration with Maurice André.
See www.maurice-andre.com for
more!
Biography
Trumpet artist and student of André, Guy Touvron has
written a biography. Unfortunately the book is only in French.
In 2007, André told his memoirs to Thierry Martin. As with Touvrons book it is only in French.
More info,
links