Under Pressure

No performing musician is quite as inflated as the virtuoso trumpeter. Preparing for a good high staccato blast or a long, breath-defying legato lament, the trumpeter can puff himself up so much that the air pressure inside him may exceed that of an average automobile tire (24 lbs. per sq. in.). No other wind player can make that statement. No other musician can literally become so dizzy so easily. No other has such a constant fight between muscular tension and interpretive relaxation and grace.

Looking at France's Maurice Andre, 41, one might guess that he possesses the puff but hardly the poetry to be the reigning prince of Baroque trumpet music. Standing 5 ft. 7 in., weighing in at 220 Ibs., shaggy of mane, void of visible intellectuality, he looks like a Paris taxi driver who has just won the Irish Sweepstakes. He bubbles. He bounces. He loves American beer. Above all, he credits his eminence in a rarified field not necessarily to years of scholarship, not to a preternatural kinship with the shades of Telemann and Tartini, but to the four years he spent working in a Provencal coal mine as a youth. "Look at these lungs," he cries after breathing deeply. "Feel these back and shoulder muscles. That is what it takes to play the Baroque trumpet."

Hearing is believing. Last week at

New York's Carnegie Hall, Andre mined pure gold in three trumpet display pieces accompanied by the very able Wuerttemberg Chamber Orchestra, with which he has been touring the U.S. He imbued Albinoni's Trumpet Concerto in B-flat with a bright, pointy dance of notes that was as mellifluously intricate as any Rossini coloratura aria.

Telemann's Sonata in D had a touchingly tender singing legato line. Tartini's Trumpet Concerto in D built to a concluding D above double C that had the audience cheering Andre as though he were Sutherland.

None of the music was especially profound. No matter. This was a festive occasion--Andre's Carnegie Hall solo debut and his first New York appearance since his recent rise to prominence via records. On this occasion, Andre played a silver-plated trumpet only 13 in. long (the standard trumpet is 21 in.). At first glance, it looked like a trick cigar lighter. Actually, it is a modern trumpet specially designed for the Baroque repertory. It has four valves --the regular three for melody, plus one valve that when held down changes the horn's pitch from B-flat to F.

That facilitates the high-wire acrobatics so common in Baroque music.

Into the Pits. This silver beauty bears little resemblance to Andre's first cornet, a gift from his father, who played in the Ales band. Though Andre pere sent his son into the pits at age 14, he kept him at his trumpet lessons. Four years later, he bowed to the teacher's urging and packed the boy off to Paris to enter the Conservatoire. For over a decade before records began to spread his reputation, Andre took any job he could get: TV commercials, jazz dates, concerts in the Michel Legrand orchestra and endless La Bohemes in the pit of the Opera Comique. Says he: "Look, every day for 44 years, my father went down into the mines with a smile on his face. How can I not be happy playing music?"

How, indeed, with 200 concerts a year, some even on musical cruises in the Mediterranean, and new LPs pouring out from RCA, Angel and the mailorder Musical Heritage Society (he has sold 400,000 records for the latter alone)? What spare time Andre has he spends at home in Fontainebleau with his wife Liliane and three of his four children: Lionel, 14, Beatrice, 13, and Nicola, 2; Daughter Dominique, 21, recently made him a grandfather. Andre has a habit of taking long walks and practicing his trumpet deep in the woods. Early one morning after a concert in Munich, Andre drove out to a meadow in the Bavarian woods and began blowing. Three men armed with rifles suddenly ran toward him furiously. They were hunters who had been lying in wait since dawn; Andre had scared off the first deer of the day. His departure was like a Vivaldi fast movement--allegro vivace.

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