In this astute interleaving of old and new, horn-player Ben Goldscheider and pianist Richard Uttley’s lunchtime recital could not have been more sonorous or richly satisfying. They opened with Schumann’s Three Fantasiestücke, Op 73, which is more often the province of clarinettists or cellists, but the full lyrical flood of Schumann’s Romanticism proved to suit the horn even better. It also showed immediately the infinite musical sensibilities of this duo, equally attuned each to the other and matched in virtuosity.
Simon Holt’s The Bell was written for them in 2022, its arresting opening – slightly spiky and precisely articulated – giving way to striking exchanges between the instruments with the glistening bell-like sounds at the top of the keyboard offering the perfect foil to the horn’s mellifluous phrases, its final clarion statement an almost defiant gesture.
Oliver Leith’s Eeyore, another work originally premiered by Goldscheider and Uttley, did indeed carry the element of humour that his title suggests. Gloomily soulful and lugubrious, any mocking was only affectionate, with the donkey-braying brilliantly realised and the musical argument cogently sustained over the course of the work’s four sections.
Scriabin’s Romance for Horn and Piano is a very early work, full of passion and a tantalising if all too brief pointer to the Russian’s future path, while Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Horn Music 1 had all the conviction of a composer for whom, as a hornist himself, the instrument has always been a potent inspiration. This was a dynamic interpretation, with the extended cadenza-like horn solo bringing an added flourish.
At the heart of the performance was – like the Schumann – another appropriation, Mahler’s Urlicht. It was a nicely sly reference to the fact that this song, later the fourth movement of his Second Symphony, began life as the last of Mahler’s song-series Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn). Goldscheider has more than a touch of magic about his playing and this Urlicht – “Primordial Light” is the translation that seems best to invoke the light the anonymous poet craves – unfolded with such expressive line and lambent glow as to be deeply moving.
