Beethoven: Horn Sonata in F major, Op. 17

This collection of rarely recorded works for horn and fortepiano is performed by two rising stars on the international scene. The British natural horn soloist Anneke Scott, a regular performer with ensembles such as The English Baroque Soloists, created an exciting duo with Amsterdam Baroque’s keyboard player Kathryn Cok and this is their debut recording. Included on the disc are works by Krufft, Beethoven, Haydn, and Leidesdorf.

Anneke Scott is rapidly emerging as one of the outstanding younger exponents of the natural horn. She is currently principal horn of Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, The English Baroque Soloists, and Harry Christopher’s Orchestra of the Sixteen. Through her work with the Etesian Ensemble she met the fortepianist Kathryn Cok with whom she formed a duo to play classical and romantic repertoire for horn and fortepiano. Kathryn Cok is also co-founder of the Caecilia-Concert, a group which specialises in performance and research of 17th century music for instruments and voices (and has also recorded for Challenge Classics).

Nicolaus von Krufft was a pupil of Johann Georg Albrechtsberger. His works include a vast number of sonatas, including the sonata for horn and fortepiano performed on this disc.

Beethoven composed his Sonata in Vienna in 1800 for the horn player Giovanni Punto during a concert tour by the highly talented young virtuoso. Although his name is mainly association with the publishers Leidesdorf und Sauer, Maximillian Joseph Leidesdorf was a prolific composer. His Sonata op. 164 was published in 1824. The Largo for horn and piano comes from Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet Hob II;74, known as the “Reiter-Quartett”.

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Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Dittersdorf, Dukas and an excerpt from the Hoffnung Music Festival, 1956.

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‘He was innately musical in a way which defies description or analysis. He shaped phrases with an instinctive rightness that seemed inevitable. Technical problems did not exist for him. He had tamed the most notoriously intractable of all instruments to be his obedient servant and raised it again to sing the song the sirens sang.’ Walter Legge

Ludwig van Beethoven, The French Revolution and the transition from Classicism to Romanticism, are all terms which belong closely together. Beethoven’s Sonatas for Fortepiano and Cello clearly demonstrate the connection as they were composed throughout his entire creative career and tell a continuous story, a musical and historical testament, of maturity and change.

Beethoven wrote nothing for solo viola – except for a sonata fragment recorded here for the first time.

He was, however, a viola player himself, and had already spent several years as a professional violist in the orchestra of his home town, Bonn, by the time he was 19 and began to achieve fame throughout Europe as a pianist and composer.

The reason he left nothing for viola is that there was no virtuoso viola-player in Vienna to commission works for the instrument. But he had a clear affection for the instrument, writing some of his most interesting parts for it in his chamber music – particularly the late quartets.

Many musicians, therefore, have ‘helped’ him fill the gaps: his contemporary Karl Xaver Kleinheinz (1765–1832) who arranged (and expanded) the String Trio Op. 8 as the Notturno, Op. 42, with Beethoven’s reluctant approval; and a later musician, Friedrich Hermann (1828–1907), who transformed the Septet, Op. 20, into an ambitious Grand Duo.

Paul Silverthorne, Principal Viola of the London Symphony Orchestra, has revised and improved these scores with reference to Beethoven’s originals.

He now expands the repertoire with his own transcription of the Horn Sonata, Op. 17.

The recording was made on period instruments: a Viennese Blümel piano (1865) and a Brothers Amati viola (1620).

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Beethoven wrote several works before 1800 which were composed for groups of wind instruments. However it was the horn that best came to depict nature at the beginning of the 19th century; Romantic composers being quick to take advantage of the instrument that Punto developed, writing sonatas for the instrument of which those by Beethoven and his pupil Ries are the most well known.

Ries and Czerny were pupils of Beethoven and Moscheles was an admirer and financial supporter of him. This CD brings their works for horn and piano together. Marsolais was principal horn of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra but is now dedicated to performing solo and chamber music.

A party of outstanding musicians joins Luc Bergé, the acclaimed horn soloist of the l'Orchestre des Champs Elysées, on this record to celebrate the beauties of the classic and romantic horn. A specific instrument is used for each work of this gourmet menu.The main course is definitely the lesser known work, Reinecke's delightful trio.