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 ...
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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...
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