Review in the British Horn Magazine

Our recording continues to receive good reviews. This time the British Horn Magazine published by the British Horn Society!

Nuestra grabación continúa recibiendo buenas críticas. ¡Esta vez en el British Horn Magazine editado por la British Horn Society!

Mozart Horn Concertos and Horn Quintet: Javier Bonet (Horn) with the Munich Radio Orchestra, conducted by Hermann Baumann.

Many years ago, when I lived in South West London, we always used to refer to the no. 14 bus service as “the banana bus” because they always came in bunches.    Mozart horn concertos are a bit like that.   After Dennis Brain’s peerless recording in the 50s, Barry Tuckwell, Alan Civil and Hermann Baumann each recorded them several times over in the 60s and 70s and then there was a torrent of recordings in the late 80s and early 90s.   The flood then dried to a trickle for several years, but after much vaunted recent recordings from Alessio Allegrini, Roger Montgomery and Pip Eastop, a fourth has now appeared from Javier Bonet.

Even before discussing the recording itself, it must be said that this one is certainly different: it was partially financed by a massive crowd-funding campaign and the contributors listed in the booklet contains the names of many of the great and good of the horn playing world.    Furthermore, it isn’t actually a CD as such, because the data is presented on a USB stick, which has the advantage that the music itself lasts for more than the 78 minutes or so which can be fitted onto a CD.   In addition to the concertos, the recording also includes a performance of the Horn Quintet, a substantial video about the making of the recording, facsimiles of Mozart’s autograph scores of the concertos, photos, copies of the cadenzas and a video recording of the finale of the D major concerto, played on hand horn.

A bonus of a different kind comes in the form of the conductor of the Munich Radio Orchestra, none other than Hermann Baumann who, apart from having recorded the music himself as a soloist, was also Javier Bonet’s teacher.    Since the early days of recording Mozart’s horn concertos, scholarship has moved on and rather than just the standard four concertos, Bonet has chosen to include from among the surviving fragments the lovely but incomplete opening of a concerto in E major, the Concert Rondo in John Humphries’ completion and has preferred Kurt Marguerre’s version of the finale of the D major concerto to the more frequently heard Süssmayr version.   He has also elected to play John Humphries’s reconstruction of the first movement of the E flat concerto, K417 which, Humphries argues in his sleeve note, is probably closer to what Mozart may have intended than the more usual ending.

What of the performances?    The vocal quality in Bonet’s playing is surely influenced by Baumann’s approach, though his tone is more rounded, and less nasal than his mentor’s.    While his lyrical delivery possibly comes as a slight surprise to those schooled in the English and American ways of doing things, it is also something of a breath of fresh air and an antidote to some of the more straight – and straitlaced – readings around, particularly in the first movements where playing is pleasantly detailed and spontaneous.    The music is presented in two formats, either as mp3 files or as the slightly higher quality .wav format.    You can decide for yourself which version you want to listen to but it is in the latter that Bonet’s almost shimmering tone is heard at its subtlest.   Slow movements are light and quite lively and while the finales of K447 and K495 are suitably rollicking, the finale of K417 is more flexible and plumbs greater depths than it sometimes does.    Most of the time, the Munich Radio Orchestra does a good job, though occasionally there is some slightly untidy string playing, though these moments do little to detract from the overall effect.   After all, much the same charge could be levied against the more heavily upholstered strings of the Philharmonia in the famous Brain performances and nobody worries about them over much.  It is a crowded market place out there and while every horn player will have his or her favourites, these performances are certainly distinctive, thought provoking and might easily make it to the top of someone’s list.

John Willam