The third concert in this summer’s Bradfield Festival of Music, given in the idyllic picture-postcard setting of St Nicholas Church, High Bradfield, was performed by the Goldscheider Duo, horn player Ben Goldscheider and pianist Richard Uttley. The audience was thin on the ground, a situation only partly explained by the unfortunate fact that the concert coincided with a crucial football match of national interest at Euro 2024. Maybe it would have been a small crowd anyway, the French horn repertoire perhaps lacking the wider appeal of, say, recitals for piano, violin or cello, but those who forsook the England football team’s travails in Germany were rewarded with a performance of dazzling virtuosity and no little charm.
Three themes threaded their way through the concert. Firstly, it was almost all French repertoire (“putting the French back into the French horn,” as Goldscheider quipped, with a self-deprecating wince), the exception being the French-speaking Belgian Jeanne Vignery, and all the works were composed in the 100 years from 1860-1960. Secondly, Goldscheider programmed all three of the chamber compositions for horn and piano by Camille Saint-Saëns, two Romances and the rather better known Morceau de concert. The last of these opened the programme, and from the outset it was clear that Goldscheider had mastered the technical challenges of the work, particularly the rapid rhythmic complexities of its closing section. Some of his most affecting playing came in the legato lines of the central Adagio, suffused with the sort of tenderness one rarely associates with a composer as emotionally detached as Saint-Saëns.
The Romances might best be described as high-class salon music, but the E major Op.67 (which had a complicated life, being initially a movement from a suite for cello and piano 20 years earlier, before being reworked for horn) has the sort of limpid innocence of a Mendelssohnian ‘Song without Words’, and it drew from both players a reading that felt as though it were a private performance being given for the love of the piece rather than something to meet the demands of an audience in public.
The third thread running through the evening was the fact that two of these works were composed as test pieces for horn players at the Paris Conservatoire. Eugène Bozza’s En Forêt (1941) makes much of the French horn’s antecedents in the world of hunting, with its fanfares and their characteristic ‘call and response’ patterns. Goldscheider cruised through its challenges – lip trills, glissandi, exploiting the horn’s full melodic range – with barely a flinch, and in the process demonstrated that the work is more than just a vehicle for showing off the player’s technique. More impressive still was Dukas’ Villanelle, another examination work, with its lyrical melodic opening demanding fluid legato playing. There were some tough tests – using the ‘bell hand’ to generate echo effects, for example – but most of all it felt in Goldscheider’s hands like an exquisitely beautiful piece of music.
The two most substantial pieces of the evening were Poulenc’s Élégie, with its quasi-serialist opening, which Goldscheider despatched with a blend of stunning violence and tender pathos, and Jeanne (‘Jane’) Vignery’s Sonata for horn and piano. Goldscheider and Uttley (a reassuringly secure accompanist throughout, with his own moment in the spotlight in Debussy’s loved-up L’Isle joyeuse) showed the Vignery to be a rich and rewarding work, particularly in the brooding lyricism of its slow movement.
