At Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh, Wynton Marsalis is hard to spot. When he first played this venue, in 1984, he was the prodigious 22-year-old soloist out front, blowing Haydn’s trumpet concerto under the baton of Lorin Maazel. Tonight he is embedded in the machinery: half-hidden behind ranks of strings and woodwind, a black-suited figure in the heart of his own symphony.
It’s a strange way for a composer to behave – especially one whose public persona has long been associated with certainty, polemic and the upright authority of a man who can make any argument sound like a moral law. Yet Marsalis seems almost pleased by his disappearance. “It’s my piece,” he says, as we talk in his hotel room the next morning, “but it’s not my show.”
