EVENINGS WITH THE FRENCH HORN
Mark Papworth & Rosa Scaffidi
Move Records MCD 640
For his latest excursion into the byways of horn performance and composition, Mark Papworth is again allying himself with pianist Rosa Scaffidi, following the success of their 2020 Siegfried's Story disc with tuba Per Forsberg. This time, the horn-piano duet presents two works only: a bona fide sonata for natural horn by Adolphe Blanc, a versatile 19th century chamber music composer whose life-span overlapped with that of Hector Berlioz, whose six-part song-cycle Nuits d'ete has been arranged for this recorded performance by Papworth.
Admittedly, this popular sequence of chansons has been arranged over the years since its first publication. Originally set for mezzo or tenor and piano, later versions by Berlioz accommodated baritone, soprano and contralto. But then, he directed that specific songs be addressed by particular voice types; ah, what a character. That detail is ignored these days where - in concerts, recitals and on CDs - one singer sings the series right through. Nevertheless, as far as I can see, the composer didn't arrange any of the set for an instrument; certainly not by the time he got around to orchestrating all of them in 1856.
Naturally, in this new format the nature of the work changes and Gautier's verses become unnecessary; well, without a voice, they would, wouldn't they? It's fair to say that the horn is not the most malleable of instruments for this set of songs and this is apparent from the opening Villanelle which strikes me as laboured, right from the opening Quand viendra in the vocal line. It's as if Papworth is at pains to articulate each note, rather than handling Berlioz's phrases as lyrical continuities. As well, the horn's weight sounds at odds with the repeated quaver chord accompaniment.
Le spectre da la rose works better, possibly because of the rhapsodic nature of the vocal line and Papworth does excellent service in outlining his part with well-honed phrasing. Scaffidi's reading of the bar 3 right hand differs from my edition and her attack on the two-bar interlude after the end of stanza 1 is too aggressive by far. For Sur les lagunes, the break inserted in the middle of the held horn note across bars 12 to 14 sounds uncomfortable and the piano's left-hand chord before Que mon sort est amer! fails to sound convincingly. As this song progresses, you become aware of some notes in the horn part sounding 'thin',; I don't know enough about the instrument to speak with certainty about the facility of even timbre across scale passages, but I'm assuming that certain phrase-shapes are hard to negotiate with a consistency of output.
But then, it might be a limitation of Papworth's chosen instrument, which is a French piston valve horn. This option is almost certainly brought into play because an 1880s horn should best align with the composer's usual 'sound', rather than the later German rotary vale construct that obtains in most (all?) orchestras today. Chromatic scales seem to be non-existent or rare in horn parts until late Romantic works.
Anyway, we proceed to Absence which presents as suited to the horn's colour. As well, the simplicity of the recurring refrain gives Papworth room to employ several modes of articulation while taking minimal liberties with the song's caesurae and downward-plunging arpeggios. You can enjoy some fine moments in Au cimitiere, even if the tempo is rock solid and the pleasures are mainly harmonic, like the piano shift in bar 5 and again in bar 12. But the approach is dogged and you lack a singer's ability to invest tension generated by Gautier's spectral suggestions.
As at the start, so at the end. The concluding L'ile inconnue suffers from an orchestra's absence, even if the work has an infectious grandiloquence in its best moments. Scaffidi's semiquavers underneath the second stanza are muffled and her dynamics are often at odds with the original, e.g. an f for a ppp at the end of this section. Papworth presents a malleable line, touching at the conclusion where the soft reprise of some of the poem's opening lines offers a fine realization of the poet's gentle questioning.
As for the sonata, here the faint notes become more prominent because of the nature of Papworth's instrument: a natural horn, the kind that would have been used by Mozart but which you rarely hear employed in live performances of his concertos for the horn - at least, in this country. The performers repeat the exposition of the first movement Allegro which strikes me as unnecessary because the form and melodic character are easy to assimilate and the orthodox lay-out of these pages means that you aren't faced with any difficulties in recalling what is established as subject to expansion. No complaints about the horn line but Scaffidi's quaver octave sequences are suspect in the opening pages and the semiquavers that follow the second subject's treatment would certainly have benefitted from re-recording; at one point, they simply don't appear.
However, this is solid writing with no surprises, even for 1861 when post-Berlioz orchestration was affecting a large number of French writers. Much the same could be said of the following Scherzo which features an unexceptional falling arpeggio figure as its main impetus; the horn's in F, the arpeggio's in F the movement's in F, and the following harmonic shifts in the B flat Major Trio almost exclusively apply to the piano. Once again, I'm not sure about some of Scaffidi's imitative work in the first segment of this movement but the horn is untroubled in a set of pages that offer no real challenges.
During the third movement Romanze, you have more opportunity to notice the instrument's 'faint' notes and engage in the perennial puzzle as to why the overtone sequence works the way it does. As far as content is concerned, this is a Mendelssohnian bagatelle in A flat Major with a neatly shaped main melody and a middle interlude that begins in F minor and walks an uncomplicated path back to the home key. Scaffidi's work is reliable and Papworth exercises his presence in pages where the keyboard initially assumes the dominant role.
The concluding Allegro opens bravely enough but it's in a hefty 6/8 in F and the horn's inevitable weak notes are more common here than anywhere else in the sonata and more noticeable because the metrical accents are heavy. Neither performer is totally convincing across these pages, the piano part occasionally clumsy in semiquaver passages, notably in the piu vivo coda which fails to sparkle but flounders along its path. It makes an unsatisfying end to this recording that aims to give us an insight into the sound world of the horn as most of us don't know it. You'd probably need to to be a devotee of this particular musical corner and more receptive than most to its limitations and oddities. As a final note, the CD is rather brief, coming in at a few seconds over 54 minutes long.
No comments:
Post a Comment