Classical trumpet star Alison Balsom making Hill Auditorium debut

Sound the trumpet, indeed: Alison Balsom is coming to town.

Or, more precisely, to Hill Auditorium Saturday evening, along with the Scottish Ensemble, courtesy of the University Musical Society.

If you haven’t heard of, or simply heard, Balsom, you’re in for a treat. This lissome 30-something British trumpeter is not simply another pretty pair of lips. The blood good looks don’t hurt, but it’s the playing—clean, smooth, sweet, pure, silvery and technically totally at ease—that’s earned her two “Female Artist of the Year” at the Classical BRITs and the lead slot, in 2009, at one of classical music’s most celebrated concerts: the last night of the BBC Proms, which reached its biggest ever global TV audience, an estimated 200 million. Lest it need saying, the Scottish Ensemble, the UK’s only professional string orchestra, is no slouch either.

For their UMS debut, Balsom and the Scottish Ensemble are going for baroque: a program devoted largely to Handel and Purcell, with a little Vivaldi, Geminiani and Albinoni thrown in for good measure.

Balsom is no stranger to this repertoire; in fact, one of her hit albums, “Sound the Trumpet: Royal Music of Purcell & Handel,” is, like the concert, entirely devoted to baroque literature, either original or in arrangements of her making. That’s another of her talents: taking music written for other instruments or for the voice, and making it seem totally natural on the trumpet.

“I’m a massive classical music fan,” she said in a recent phone call from London, speaking about her arrangements. “I’d be frustrated if I could not play these great compositions. It’s not about the instrument; I’m compelled to do this, and it’s a lot of fun. I like to stretch myself,” she said of the arrangements.

So where does she look for likely material to transcribe for trumpet?

“It’s much easier,” she said,” from oboe or violin than from organ or harp,” because the former are generally single-line instruments. And pieces for voice lend themselves to her ministrations well. “It’s like writing for soprano voice,” she said. “When I write, I think about what you’d write for a treble singer.”

Her Ann Arbor program includes her arrangements of an Albinoni oboe concerto and a Vivaldi violin concerto.

It also includes Balsom on two types of trumpet: the natural trumpet, a valveless instrument also known as a baroque trumpet; and the modern trumpet. This program is the first in which Balsom is switching between the two in concert, she said. She’ll play a few works on modern trumpet in the first half of the program, and then play the second half on natural trumpet.

The natural trumpet is the instrument Purcell and Handel would have known.

“Its vocal quality is amazing,” said Balsom. “It has a sweet and lovely sound. I’m so in love with this authentic instrument style; it strips away modern additions that don’t need to be there. I think people will love it.”

Balsom, who said she’s not from a musical family, was 7 when she took up the trumpet in her school band.

Why’d she pick it?

“I loved the look of the instrument,” she said. “I thought it was the coolest instrument.”

She never really looked elsewhere. “I was really committed from a very young age,” she said.

Still, as a kid, she toyed with the idea of playing the cello, and played the piano a bit (“I was very, very bad,” she said.) But soon, the trumpet was, as she put it, “a soundtrack for my life.”

Now her playing is a soundtrack for ours.