This double CD offers six concertos for two horns, as well as one concerto for three horns and a sextet for two horns and string quartet, all dating from the late eighteenth century. Brothers Zdenek and Bedrich Tylsar, Czech horn players with impressive solo, orchestral, and academic credentials, play with assurance and musical sensitivity. The brothers' playing is characteristic of Eastern European hornists -- a relatively small and slightly covered, but focused tone. They use modern double valve horns, which avoid the intonational vagaries of the valveless Waldhorns for which these works were written, and which greatly increase the facility with which these pieces can be played. What is lost (besides variable tone quality and perilous intonational mishaps) is a sense of the wildness that was an accepted element of the horn's sound at the time. So it's a trade-off -- these are not "original instrument" performances, but the are fine examples of the high level of accuracy and consistently even tone quality that modern audiences have come to expect of horn players. The Classical-era concertos show off the horn's bravura character as well as its ability to produce long, expressively lyrical lines. The combination of two horns is especially attractive, so it's not surprising that there is a relatively large body of work for this ensemble, but it is surprising that these double horn concertos are so little known today. While they may not rise to the level of Mozart's sublime solo horn concertos, each of these works has plenty of charm and musical inventiveness and should be of interest to fans of rarities of the Classical era.
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