Virtuoso Horn Duo

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It is with great pleasure that we present these four works for 2 solo horns and chamber orchestra. The opening concerto by Haydn has been a source of controversy among horn players for quite some time. This charming and highly melodic work has all the trademarks of a concerto by his contemporary, the horn player Antonio Rosetti. Indeed, it would not at all have been unusual for Rosetti to use the great Haydn name in order to sell what may have been his finest piece of music. Apparently that sort of thing was done rather regularly in those days. The version on this recording is from the first publication of the Oettinger-Wallenstein Manuscript and was arranged by Edmond Leloir.

The concerto in E-flat by Rosetti, which we have included on this album, could almost stand as proof of this theory as there are many similarities betwen the two works. Antonio Rosetti understood the horn remarkably well - he was after all a horn player - and thi si quite evident in these two works. The version recorded here of the Concerto Grosso number II from the larger group of works entitled "L'estro armonico" is an arrangement that was presented to us by Mr. Zoltan Varga with the request that we perform it at the Hungarian International Horn Festival at Mór. After assessing its succcess, we decided to include it on this recording and it has become a staple of our repertoire ever since.

The decision regarding the fourth work of the album was not an easy one. There is, after all, a plethora of great concertos written for 2 horns and orchestra - Bach, Vivaldi, Leopold Mozart, Kuhlau, Händel and Telemann, just to name a few. Naturally, we wanted to include something a little bit different and perhaps something new. Thus we came upon the idea ot rework a piece of mine originally composed for solo horn and organ. We had previously performed this piece rearranged for 2 horns and piano at a recital in Rome. At the time, I knew that this Gothic sounding work had not yet found its true home. Adding some new material and a few special effects and reworking it for string orchestra seemed to be an answer to this call. The story behind the piece is a simple one: there is a writers competition called the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, inspired by the parenthetical, rambling, melodramatic opening lines of a novel by the author of the same name. Contestants submit a sentence intended to open a novel, usually comic or satirical in nature, along the lines of the original "It was a dark and stormy night..." It just so happens that this is a wonderful way to start a musical composition as well. I truly had no idea where I was going with this work until I wrote the opening solo horn call - my version of "Twas a dark and stormy night..."