Jeroen Billiet and Terra Nova Collective present world premiere horn recordings from the Brahms era.
Chants d’Amour Lyrical confessions of a horn player
Music is the undisputed ally of the universal language called love. Composers of the romantic era have welcomed the noble sound of the horn as a perfect carrier for pouring their turbulent and passion time into sound. Troughout the 18th and 19th century, a long and continuous exchange of ideas between players, composers and instrument manufacturers transformed the crude hunting horn into a refined solo instrument. In the Belgian context, this led to the development of a particular and distinctive “Lyrical” playing style from 1850 onwards.
A clear example of this evolution is the concert repertoire of one of the heralds of the romantic Belgian horn school, Alphonse Stenebruggen (Liège 1824-Strasbourg 1895). The playlist of Chant d’Amour is entirely shaped by pieces played by this Liègeois during his nearly 50 year-long international playing carreer. Stenebruggen’s encounters with the great and mighty of his time serve as a great imaginatory source: his contacts with Johannes Brahms, whom he met around the moment the latter was composing his magnificent trio opus 40; and with Saint-Saens during many performances of his fine Romance opus 36. This context inspired me towards a prominent “Lyrical” interpretation of these pieces on French romantic natural horn.
A vaguely conservative fascination for slow and simple elegance rules in most of the extensive Belgian valve horn repertoire of the time, which was projected into instrument manufacture particularly by valve horn manufacturer Ferdinand Van Cauwelaert of Brussels, and translated into music by composers as Radoux, Samuel and Van Cromphout. All performers on this disk have put their talent in function of the rediscovery of the musical intentions of the composer, by playing on period instruments for a matter of colour and rethinking the organic structure in a lyrical context.
Explaining this cross-pollination between players, builders and repertoire has been the main goal of the research project Horn playing in the Lyrical Style (AP-Institute, Royal Antwerp Conservatory 2014-2018), of which this disc is one of the artistic results.
Read more about the pieces, instruments and style on
www.terranovacollective.com
Jeroen Billiet
Editing by Anneke Scott
World premiere horn recordings of the Brahms era
The world premieres on this album all date from around 1865, the year in which Johannes Brahms composed one of the most magnificent works in the horn literature: the Trio opus 40. The second half of the nineteenth century knew a lively culture of chamber music that was patronized largely by the educated bourgeoisie. No composer epitomizes this culture more than Johannes Brahms, who published a total of twenty-four large-scale works for ensembles of two to six players. Most of these works are for combinations of keyboard and string instruments. Wind instruments, by contrast, are rare: in addition to the Horn Trio, they appear only in the much later Clarinet Quintet opus 115 and Clarinet Trio opus 114.
Every one of Brahms’s chamber works with winds, therefore, is something special. Comparing them to more traditional genres—the Horn Trio, for instance, is sometimes described as a piano trio with a horn instead of a cello—only highlights their singularity. The first publication of the Horn Trio included an alternative cello part, but even in an outwardly normalized performance by a piano trio (which Brahms thought sounded “awful”), the cello would still sound as if it were trying to imitate the horn. This is music that could not have been written for any other instrument than the horn.
The idiomatic horn writing in the Trio is, however, not what one might initially expect. The most predictable side of the horn’s musical persona, the hunting style, comes to the fore only in the finale. What stands out in the first three movements is the lyrical, or, as one contemporary reviewer put it, the “dark” side of the instrument. In this respect it is important that Brahms wrote his Trio not for the modern valve horn, but for the valveless hand horn, an instrument he also preferred in his orchestral works. By the time Brahms wrote his Trio, and especially in German-speaking Europe, the valve horn had rapidly gained popularity because of its greater ease of playing chromatically. For Brahms, this technical advantage came at the expense of a loss of the horn’s true character: a diversity in timbre across the range; a much darker sound quality, because of the many stopped notes; and a greater overall expressivity. Whenever he could, Brahms tried to convince players to perform his Trio on the hand horn. You can play it on a modern horn, he once wrote, but then “all poetry is lost.”
dr. Steven Vande Moortle - Toronto University