Alison Balsom: 'You can't hide behind a trumpet'

When the Scottish composer James MacMillan wrote Seraph for Alison Balsom, it was more than a compliment – it was a description. For Balsom, a trumpeter with a cascade of blond hair, looks and sounds seraphic. She has delighted audiences as an exemplary musician (she won female artist of the year at the 2009 and 2011 Classic Brit awards) and as a reinventer of the trumpet's image. She has blown away the stereotype of the male brass player – and is a role model for many a young woman keen to blow her own trumpet.

It is a cold, sunny day when we meet at Dulwich Picture Gallery, not far from Alison's home. She is dressed all in black save for her eye-catching fur boots (they look almost alive). I tell her I have been listening to the new album (Seraph: Trumpet Concertos) and am bewitched by its beauty. Seraph is filled with regret, instability and moments of inwardness. Balsom hears the trumpet as "incredibly versatile… one of the closest instruments to the human voice". She believes that every instrument is "an extension of the personality of the player". And yet at the same time: "You have to let music take you over, put ego aside, be a clean conductor – in the electrical sense." Trainee trumpeters, she explains, often treat it as "a sport" and feel that mastering the strenuous technique is everything when, actually, it is only "the beginning of what is possible".

Thirty-three-year-old Balsom first dreamed of becoming a trumpeter when her parents – her father was a builder – took her to the Barbican to hear Håkan Hardenberger play the Hummel trumpet concerto. "We lucked out – we didn't know we were about to hear the best musician in the world." Since then, her life has come full circle. She has studied with Hardenberger and played the Hummel herself at St Martin-in-the-Fields – "a dream come true". Another dream was performing Haydn's trumpet concerto at the Last Night of the Proms: "It was beyond fantastic to be there. I had goose pimples, was thrilled by it."

Alison has a two-year-old son named Charlie – she separated earlier this year from his father, conductor Edward Gardner. And like most working mothers, she has had her childcare crises, though she has noticed how motherhood has dramatically improved her time-management skills. And what does Charlie make of her trumpeting? Nowadays, she admits, he wants her either to play with him or to seize her trumpet and "play it himself".

At one point, she notes: "You can't hide behind a trumpet." And this month she is to become extra conspicuous in her home town of Royston, Hertfordshire. She is tickled pink because a statue of her is soon to be unveiled. Will she go along and play to it? "A little fanfare is the least I can do."