It is no surprise that these posts may well be dominated by Horns and music by composers who wrote good horn parts. Today’s choice is from an album that would undoubtedly have been in my 20 if I wasn’t restricting that to LPs.
One of the things that happened as a result of my attending the Glasgow School’s camp was that I was asked if I would like to go along to the Glasgow Arts Centre Orchestra as they needed another horn player. It was there that I met a young, inexperienced horn player who, for the next few years, was in many of the horn sections that I was part of. The Arts Centre Orchestra was quite a small one – mainly young people – and the repertoire was primarily ‘light’ classical music. The following summer he was at Castle Toward for the Glasgow School’s 1st Orchestra camp as my 4th Horn.
For a while when I was teaching Horn in the Glasgow schools he was actually one of my pupils. Since then, he has gone on to bigger and better things as, amongst other things, principal horn of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra as well as five years as honorary chairman of the British Horn Society. I like to think that I had a small influence on that career 😉
That horn player, Hugh Seenan, was the instigator of the “London Horn Sound” recordings and it is him that you hear in the opening solo of the linked track (he also is heard on a large number of movie soundtracks!). The range of the Horn makes it ideally suited to playing as an ensemble and this album brilliantly shows that it can adapt to lots of different styles. I could have chosen lots of the tracks, but I have gone with an arrangement of the music from the film “Titanic”.
Enjoy