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Second Cuvilliés Chamber Concert, Bavarian State Opera, Opera Festival 2008:   Hornists of the Bavarian State Opera Orchestra, Cuvilliés Theater, Munich  15.7.2008 (JFL)


If the Eroica Symphony is that much greater a work for including horns, then certainly  the horn as such must be that great an instrument. Imagine such greatness times eight – and you arrive necessarily, logically, at the genus of the horn octet. A compelling idea, clearly as it should be a slice of musical heaven, on a par with the Ode to Joy or the Halleluiah chorus, by virtue of configuration alone.

If somehow the arithmetic doesn’t solve quite as neatly as it might, then this  must be because musical reality needs more than mathematics and has a kind of life of its own. And much of this  truth could be found out at the 2nd Chamber Concert in honor of the re-opening of the Munich Cuvilliés Theater, the incomparable rococo jewel-box which the diminutive jester-cum-architect François de Cuvilliés built for Elector of Bavaria, Max III. Joseph. But actually this concert – featuring nothing else but  horns – turned out not nearly as silly as it might seem from the above premise. (A premise which I have admittedly distorted and re-fashioned to my own liking from the somewhat more humble program notes.)

In fact, if you wanted to make an all-horn concert a genuinely interesting affair, then the concert's  first half provided the blueprint on how to do it. Eight horns began with a Michael Praetorius baroque suite which had the qualities of tender organ pipes played by an eight-fingered instrumentalist somewhere above. Three natural horns provided a very different look in Three Trios by F.Clapisson and  what would have been a manageable task on modern French horns became fiendishly difficult on these instruments – a fact that demanded due acknowledgement by  the players without diminishing the musicians of the Bavarian State Orchestra's accomplishments.

Three pieces by Gioachino Rossini were then played on four huge, valveless hunting horns and the players appropriately donned hunting coats to match. Tailored to these instruments, it was fairly simple music, of course and the result was akin to watching bicyclists climbing a steep mountain pass in the age of SUVs or Olympian sprinters run the 100-meter dash with their shoes tied together.

Regular horns were in use for Eugéne Bozza’s (1905 -1991)  “Suite Pour Quatre Cors”. The six-partita work could be shorter, but the opening Prélude is kind on the ears. It's all spectacularly unfashionable, of course, as someone must have forgotten to tell Mr. Bozza that writing music of conventional beauty and harmony – even for friends – is very much a breach of convention (and not at all the  bon ton as it were) among 20^th century composers.  Calliope (the beautiful voiced daugther of Zeus) was not audibly present when this work was begotten, but it is gratifying Gebrauchsmusik capping off a varied first half that was as much a feast for the eyes as for the ears.

Idomeneo ballet music sequences played  by ten (yes,10!) horns means that much Mozart and all the Mozartean lightness is lost. Imagine the “Dance of the Shadows” from La Bayadère as re-interpreted by two dozen small circus elephants. You admire the dexterity, but the grace of the original suffers somewhat along the way.

We may not think of Richard Strauss as a patently light composer – but he was an incredibly adept one and the colors and existent lightness (which is very light, when it does show up) suffers almost as much from this sort of transcription (both by Franz Kanefzky) as did the Mozart.  Everything is gray and unlovely, even if occasional turns of phrases of this adapted Rosenkavalier-mélange rang true in the French horn monoculture. Had those perfectly lovely moments been sought out with greater discrimination, the whole affair would probably have been thoroughly pleasing.  As it was, the mere accomplishment of playing the music reasonably faultlessly did not suffice for whole-hearted admiration for either of these two pieces. Curious, though probably not surprising, that the two more promising works made for the much less inspired half.

Jens F. Laurson


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