Few could handle this solo: That's what made this Ontarian the hottest trumpet in Oregon

July 13, 2002

By William Littler
From The Toronto Star

EUGENE, Ore. — The conductor Helmuth Rilling couldn’t help smiling when he thought back to Guy Few’s trumpet solos in last summer’s performance of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 at the Oregon Bach Festival.

Among the highest and most treacherous in the entire trumpet literature, they represented a challenge so great for previous generations of trumpeters that Germany’s Adolf Scherbaum, who could play them on a piccolo B-flat trumpet, made a pretty fair living travelling around Europe whenever Brandenburg II turned up on a major concert series.

Few reportedly played those same solos so brilliantly on his four-valve piccolo trumpet last summer that the audience in Eugene’s Hult Centre broke into applause following the third movement.

“He played flawlessly,” the silver-haired German conductor recalled, “and then he did something I can’t imagine any other trumpeter in the world doing: He encored the music, playing it flawlessly again.”

By now, visitors to Eugene’s annual high-level international Bach-fest have come to expect no less of the native of Saskatoon. Over the course of the last seven years, he has helped Helmuth Rilling make a college town in the middle of the tree-studded state of Oregon a point of pilgrimage for Bach lovers from all over North America and beyond.

And not just Bach lovers. This summer, two days after dazzling his listeners in a Rilling-conducted, festival-opening performance of Bach’s monumental B Minor Mass, he rejoined the festival orchestra for an elegantly tootled account of Haydn’s E-Flat Major Concerto.

For the B Minor Mass he even added a new instrument to his armoury, a modern version of what Bach’s score ambiguously describes as a corno da caccia (hunting horn), specially made for him in Germany by Heinrich and Wilhelm Thein and resembling a cross between a French horn and a cornet.

The cornet is an instrument Few has known since childhood. His father played it, and another relative played its close cousin, the trumpet, which Few Jr. compulsively picked up at around the age of 8 and has yet to put down.

But neither of these sassy brasses was his first instrument. At least four years earlier he was already tickling ivories, and he estimates that his time nowadays is divided about evenly between keyboard- and brass-playing — that is, when he is not singing.

Singing? “Yes,” the tousled blond virtuoso shrugged during a backstage, before-rehearsal interview the other day. “I studied with some wonderful teachers, but when I was in my teens I was frustrated by a lack of information from them on breathing and support. So I contacted a voice teacher, and she said, `We can’t just do breathing exercises. We have to sing.’”

And so, the pianist-trumpeter discovered a serviceable tenor voice to add to his range of musical options. He’ll be exercising it in some Noel Coward songs Aug. 3 as part of an Elora Festival concert with pianist Stephanie Mara, with whom he will also play four-hand piano duets between his trumpet solos.

Shortly before that he will also be applying all three talents at the Westben Arts Festival Theatre’s Concerts At The Barn, July 20 and 21 in Campbellford, Ont., when he teams up with the other two members of his trio Bellows and Brass, accordionist Joseph Petric and trombonist Alain Trudel.

Stuntsmanship? Not really. As Few has demonstrated, his various musical talents actually reinforce each other. “It is my application of exclusively vocal technique that makes me different from other trumpet soloists,” he suggested.

Balancing 80 or so solo and ensemble engagements annually with his duties as adjunct professor of trumpet studies at his alma mater, Wilfrid Laurier University, doesn’t leave Few much time to follow the doctor’s orders to scale back his workload. At 39, he is clearly in his career’s prime.

But he is also the survivor of two dramatic brain surgeries, either of which might have brought his career to a sudden conclusion.

The first surgery, in 1990, virtually shut him down for three months. As he recalled, “I lost motor skills, I lost language, I lost diaphragm and embouchure control. I had to learn everything over again.”

Then, two and a half years ago, a Toronto neurosurgeon diagnosed “a massive malformation the size of a large deli pickle between the two front lobes of my brain.”

Instead of taking the neurosurgeon’s advice and submitting to an immediate operation, Few embarked on a tour with Trudel and Petric until a series of seizures forced him into hospital. A month later he was back playing again.

No one who hears him play Bach could dream that death has twice within a decade come knocking at the door of Canada’s finest trumpeter. The sound he produces is the very face of optimism.

Nor does a different face emerge in conversation. Articulate, funny and full of energy, he numbers among the most popular members of Eugene’s extended Bach family.

“It was scary coming here at first,” he admitted. “I’m not an orchestral player, and the first thing I had to play was the B Minor Mass. But there is a wonderful spirit here. People come together with the simple goal of performing beautiful music beautifully. I am nurtured here as a player. I feel celebrated.”

Luckily for his fellow Ontarians, this summer the celebrations are continuing in Elora and Campbellford.