Roberto Minczuk is the Jean L. and Charles V. Rainwater Guest Artist.
Jennifer Montone is the Sarah E. Rainwater and Charles S. Rainwater Guest Artist.
The concert of Saturday, February 25, is underwritten in part by a generous gift from Dr. and Mrs. Richard G. Sisson.
The concert of Friday, February 24, is sponsored by Krispy Kreme.
The concert of Saturday, February 25, is sponsored by MasterCard.

Featuring the Horn   
BY PAUL SCHIAVO 

Horns first came to orchestral music during the early 18th century. (Among the earliest works to employ them are Handel’s Water Music and Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 1.) Having been previously used in outdoor settings, primarily for hunting, it brought associations of a robust, open-air, natural world distinct from the courtly realm in which art music initially flourished. The horn retained that connotation throughout the Romantic 19th century, when it was frequently used to evoke nature. During this time, however, the horn acquired other associations also: with heroism (Wagner gave a famous horn to his hero Siegfried), and with magic (a connection Weber exploited with the horn call that begins his Oberon Overture). But composers also discovered and learned to use other qualities of this remarkable instrument, not least its lyrical eloquence. It is a rare orchestral concert in which the horn is not a noticeable presence. Our program, however, brings the instrument deliberately to the fore in works that feature it either as soloist or in an ensemble context.

            We begin with music by György Ligeti, his Concert Românesc. Ligeti, one of the most original and important musical thinkers of our time, first came to prominence during the 1960s. In his works of that decade, the usual details of melody, harmony, and rhythm collapsed into tightly woven webs of sound: dense chords yielding cloudlike sonorities, melodic lines piled up to form tangled knots of counterpoint, or long strands of taut sonority. The result was a strange new musical world, at once visceral and dreamlike, which became familiar to a wide audience when several of Ligeti’s compositions were used in the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Since the 1970s, the composer’s music has continued to evolve in a fascinating and unpredictable manner.

            Concert Românesc, however, is an early work, written in 1951, while Ligeti was still living in Communist Hungary. (He fled his homeland for the West during the uprising of 1956.) Throughout the Stalinist Soviet bloc, concert music in a folkloric vein was encouraged by government officials. Ligeti ostensibly heeded that pressure in writing Concert Românesc. He was, in fact, genuinely interested in Rumanian folk music, which he had often heard during his youth and had studied at the Folklore Institute of Bucharest, in 1949. Some of the melodies he had learned during his research made their way into his “Rumanian Concerto.” But, as the composer observed of this piece, “not everything in it is genuinely Rumanian, as I also invented elements in the spirit of the village bands.” The original touches, especially some modernist harmonies in the final movement, led to the work being banned after a single rehearsal in Budapest. It did not receive a public performance until 1971.

            The four short movements of Concert Românesc follow one another without pause. Of particular interest to us is the evocation, at the start of the third movement, of the Rumanian mountain horn. Here, the composer writes an echoing duet for two horns, calling to each other from a distance, and instructs the players to use “natural” tuning, which produces a peculiar melodic inflection. The horn calls return, poetically, at the conclusion of the piece.

If Concert Românesc celebrates the horn’s rusticity, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 2 in E‑flat major, K. 417, represents an attempt to “civilize” the instrument through urbane and elegant music. Mozart wrote this work for the horn player Joseph Ignaz Leutgeb (also spelled Leitgeb in Austrian dialect). Mozart initially met Leutgeb in Salzburg, the composer’s native city, where for several years they played together in the local orchestra. In 1781, when Mozart settled in Vienna, he renewed his acquaintance with Leutgeb, who had himself moved to the Austrian capital some four years earlier. Although Leutgeb had once been a promising virtuoso, he was now working in a cheese business owned by his wife’s family and pursuing music only on the side. Despite his unspectacular career, Leutgeb must have been an accomplished horn player.

This has long been known as the second of the four concertos Mozart wrote for Leutgeb, though recent scholarship investigating the chronology of these works has suggested that it might be the earliest of them. In any event, it follows the usual three‑movement concerto format, beginning with an unhurried Allegro maestoso. Its music suggests the latter of these adjectives, “majestic,” as, with broad melodies well suited to the warm, noble tone of the horn. The second movement brings a song‑like Andante, whereas the finale is cast as a “hunting rondo,” with fanfares and other athletic figures for the solo instrument.

Paul Hindemith composed his Horn Concerto in 1950 for the English horn player Dennis Brain. Brain’s legendary status among horn afficionados stems from a combination of his superb ability and his tragically short career. Born into a family of instrumentalists, he began playing professionally at age 17 and went on to become principal horn of two leading London orchestras. He made exemplary recordings of the Mozart horn concertos and inspired a number of compositions, including, besides Hindemith’s concerto, Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings. Sadly, he died in an automobile accident in 1957, at age 36.

Hindemith’s concerto unfolds in three movements, though these vary the classic concerto design typified by the Mozart piece we heard earlier. For one thing, Hindemith inverts the traditional fast-slow-fast sequence of movements. For another, the real weight of the composition is in the finale.

The initial two movements are brief, the first being an example of Hindemith’s clear neo-classical style, the second a rambunctious scherzo. The finale follows a three-part, slow-fast-slow design. Here Hindemith exploits the horn’s capacity for musical declamation: from the opening measures the instrument seems to be speaking to us. The composer confirms this explicitly in the movement’s central episode. There, following an agitated contrapuntal passage for the orchestra, he wrote into the score a poem, which the horn “recites” (wordlessly) in phrases that trace the contours of the words. This poem imagines the horn itself speaking. Translated from the German, it reads: 

My call transforms
The concert hall into a fall-tone grove,
The present into the unremembered,
You into the cloth and custom of your ancestors,
Your fortune into their longing and resignation.
Permit those dear shadows their resurrection,
Yourself communion with them, the half-forgotten,
And me my tone-formed longing.

            Of course, horn players have their moments to shine apart from their occasional opportunities to play as concerto soloist. In particular, many famous symphonies contain passages featuring the horn. Schubert’s “Great” C-major Symphony opens with a horn call. So does Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4. Elsewhere, we find important horn solos in Beethoven’s Symphony Nos. 3 and 9. And there is Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, in which the horn also is a conspicuous and powerful presence.

            This symphony, subtitled “From the New World,” dates from Dvořák’s sojourn in the United States. For much of 1892 through 1895, the composer lived in New York, where he was director of the short-lived National Conservatory of Music, and in Iowa, where he dwelled in a community of Czech emigrant farmers. Dvořák began writing Symphony No. 9 in January 1893, just a few months after arriving in New York. He finished the composition in May of that year, and the music was performed for the first time the following December at Carnegie Hall to a highly enthusiastic audience.

            Dvořák stated that he intended the famous subtitle to mean “Impressions and greetings from the New World.” This is very different than a musical panorama of America and American life, which some commentators have held the piece to be. (That, in any case, would be a dubious interpretation in view of the work’s creation during Dvořák’s first season in New York, before he had visited Iowa and other places in the nation’s heartland.) Yet the composer also stated that its American provenance would be obvious “to anyone who ‘had a nose,’” and he told a correspondent: “I do know that I would never have written [it] ‘just so’ had I never seen America.”

            This ambivalent perspective applies the symphony’s thematic material. On more than one occasion during his American sojourn, Dvořák expressed interest in black spirituals and Indian tribal music, and he once alluded to the “peculiarities of Negro and Indian music” in the themes of this symphony. But, as he also emphasized, there are no actual quotations of any American music in the “New World” Symphony. Moreover, the “peculiarities” of its melodies, particularly the prominence of “gapped” or pentatonic scales, are also those of Czech folk song.