It was with anticipation that we welcomed back to Leicester so soon after last year’s Festival the horn player Ben Goldscheider, this time in a full hour’s programme with the pianist Richard Uttley. It has to be admitted that one wondered whether the relatively narrow repertoire written for this combination would yield compelling results, an unease compounded when, on reading the programme, this listener had to admit ignorance of everything being performed and in two cases even of the composers’ existence! In the event with these players and in a cunningly variegated programme one embarked on a fascinating journey.
First of all, let us praise two fine musicians. In music for duos for piano and another instrument it is quite easy to take the former for granted and indeed, when the work or concert features the powerful horn, it is even easier to reduce the piano simply to the role of accompanist in any review. Here, however, throughout it was rare for the pianist not to feature in music that quite often brought him to the fore and, with the piano lid fully up, he certainly made a dramatic impression when those moments presented themselves, to the point that just very occasionally I wondered whether the balance was quite as ideal as it might have been.
Naturally, though, the audience had principally come to hear the latest virtuoso of the French Horn, having no doubt remembered the wonderful performance of the Brahms Horn Trio in which he participated at last year’s Festival, shortly after he had by all accounts electrified a Prom audience in a concerto performance. In the 1950s when I started to sample the wonders of the classical repertoire, I often heard the legendary Dennis Brain before his life was tragically cut short in a car accident. In an era when one crossed one’s fingers at the brutal way some central repertoire exposed the horn player sometimes at the very start of a piece, one could be confident that Brain under in particular Karajan and Beecham would sail over the hurdles without splitting a note. Such a result is for some reason almost commonplace today but it is worth remembering the difficulties that face the horn player when one hears the staggering virtuosity that is demanded of the horn soloist of the present era by the music of some contemporary composers, an example of which was featured in this concert.
And what about the music played? Today is Sunday and throughout Friday and Saturday I have been thinking about the concert and what it said about music and how we listen, so much did it stir things up. That in itself is some achievement given that to this listener and I suspect most of the audience all the music played was in effect a premiere. Of course, in idiom most of it was recognizable, most of it also was in an idiom which would not be accounted strange by an audience such as this. Yet what was intriguing to this listener at least was that, had I been some kind of Come Dancing judge, by the end of the concert my pecking order was quite different to what I imagined it might be at the beginning.
Of course, Beethoven’s Horn Sonata Op. 17 would have been a hot favourite to take the prize unless one weighed in the balance that it was an early work. Well, early it may have been but in a sparkling performance, in which the horn sailed over the deliberately fiendish difficulties designed for the customer who commissioned it , it came across as a work of some substance with the brief slow movement a real sign of things to come. Indeed, much of the music instantly brought to mind some of the middle piano sonatas.
It was a hard act for Ruth Gipps’ Triton to follow. I have heard one or two of her pieces, though not her symphony which opened a Prom concert in one of the two post Covid seasons and about which one critic complained of it taking up space which music of far greater distinction should have filled. Here I found the work pleasing enough within its more modest intentions and as such certainly worth a hearing. A significant composer cruelly ignored in her life time, though?
For me that doubt was underlined by the piece that followed it, Mark Simpson’s Nachtstuck . I had some premonition that this might be a memorable experience since the composer had made a great impression at the Festival to which he came as composer in residence. Then he showed himself to be a composer of real imagination, totally in command of the resources needed to convert that imagination into gripping music. In this work I think he has done it again, opening with an evocative passage for piano and then stretching the horn to its utmost resources to deliver at times a stunningly memorable picture of the disturbing world of sleep in all its features.
What followed it was clearly placed at this moment in the concert to allow us to sit back, relax and listen to Naji Hakim’s Romance , to enjoy its relatively straightforward melody, and none the worse for that. It did not quite prepare one for Hindemith , though!
Let me digress for a moment. Coincidently a few days ago something made me recall the French novelist Francoise Sagan who in the 50s as a young woman had an immense success with Bonjour Tristesse which was made into a famous film. Another of her novels I recalled was entitled Aimez- vous Brahms and I remembered that in my youth Brahms was quite widely thought to be really rather boring. Britten, for instance, was much under the influence of Mahler and reputedly only visited Brahms, as he said, to learn how not to compose! He might have changed his mind had he been alive when orchestral performance styles began to let in the light. Beecham (and I make no apology for returning to his wisdom for a second time in a fortnight!) had many years before declared Brahms a Romantic composer. Just listen to his performance of the Second Symphony and you will see what I mean.
And so to Hindemith who for me has generally taken on the mantle of a composer whose music rarely takes wing. Occasionally I have been impressed. The piece that, trapped in London, he famously composed in 24 hours on the day after George V died is one example, as is Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber, though one critic voted it the work with worst title in the repertory if the intention was to encourage the listener to sample a work which is full of verve and melody!
However, that has seemed to me all too rare in an oeuvre that was so determined to return German music to baroque values. I fear in its frequently relentless drive what I tend to hear all too often is music driven on an intellectual premise, mostly shorn of colour and anything really memorably melodic. Such was the case in the Horn Sonata. Despite the fine playing, gradually I found my attention waning as the music remained earthbound, failing to levitate in a way that, for instance, some of Stravinsky’s neo classical works manage.
In the event there came relief in the work that finished the concert, Eugene Bozza’s En Foret. It was clearly much influenced by Respighi and surely no one would rate this great music but in context there was a simple joy communicated that was truly refreshing. It was a delight to hear the horn in a scenario that went back to its roots as an instrument and it certainly sent the audience on its way knowing that they had heard a concert superlatively played in a programme of refreshing diversity.
The Diary of a Leicester Concert-goer 