This album of Baroque concertos for corno da caccia, or hunting horn, comes up with a unique solution for handling the tricky problem of balancing historically correct performance practice with the aesthetic expectations of general modern audiences. Before the early nineteenth century development of the valve horn, which can easily produce all pitches with timbral uniformity, the natural horn could produce tones outside the natural harmonic series when the player inserted his (because this was considered an instrument suitable only for men) right hand in the bell to alter the pitch. The altered pitches tended to have a muffled quality that the most virtuosic players could mitigate to some extent, but modern audiences don't always have a tolerance for the timbral variability of natural horns. The players on this CD use horns modeled closely on seventeenth and eighteenth century hunting horns, but with valves added to increase facility and timbral uniformity. Corni da caccia have a brighter, more trumpet-like sound than standard orchestral horns, and soloist
Michael Tunnell is, in fact, a trumpet player. The album includes seven concertos, most for solo horn, but one is for two horns, one is for violin and three horns, and there is a symphonia for four horns. Although two are by familiar composers,
Vivaldi and
Telemann, all are obscure and likely to broaden the collections of fans of music for horn. The pieces are not that musically distinguished -- they could fairly be described as fitting the stereotype of unadventurous Baroque "wallpaper music" -- but they are consistently pleasant, and they are performed with style and verve. Instead of a string orchestra, they are accompanied by organ, ably played by Jack Ashworth. The sound setting is very loud, and the solo horn is sometimes piercingly bright, so it might be necessary to adjust the volume settings.