In November 2021, two trumpets of the Sinfonieorchester Wuppertal in western Germany slithered up a chromatic motive at the beginning of the fourth movement—the “Tuba Mirum”—from Antonin Dvořák’s Requiem before disappearing into an unsettling augmented woodwind chord. The kind of exposed orchestral passage that only registers as difficult when someone cracks a note or the ensemble intonation buzzes uncomfortably, these two trumpets sounded crystalline and transparent, like a single instrument, in each of the motive’s three repetitions. They nailed the passage.
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