Horn Trios

The renowned horn player Martin Owen is joined by the violinist Francesca Dego and pianist Alessandro Taverna in this varied and compelling programme. Mozart's Horn Quintet, KV 407 is one of the earliest examples of the horn in chamber music - although this partnership was embraced by Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Schumann among many others. The Quintet is unusually scored for horn, violin, two violas, and cello, but the majority of the melodic interplay in the work occurs between the horn and the violin, so replacing the lower strings with piano works very well. Brahms's Horn Trio was the first major work for this instrumentation, and remains one of the finest in the repertoire.

This performance of the Horn Trio Op 40 is my favorite of the moment. It is so lively and engaging that I had to give it my full attention on the first hearing; no multitasking while these musicians are playing. The trio and the Serenade Op 11 - the Serenade is the original nonet version - are emotionally charged, gritty (but not ugly at all) tangy and deeply satisfying. Well balanced recording and great sound.

Hermann Baumann is easily one of the finest horn players of the second half of the 20th century. He came to prominence as a soloist in the 1960s and in 1964 won the prestigious ARD International Music Competition in Munich, beating out Jessye Norman for first place

As the predecessors of Sony Classical, CBS Masterworks had not a catalogue of ""authenticity-minded"" recordings (the pioneering efforts of Raymond Leppard and Jean-Claude Malgoire notwithstanding), Sony made a distinctive new start and engaged indubitably one of the most experienced producers in the field of early music, Wolf Erichson. If the successes secured by such musicians as Gustav Leonhardt, Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Frans Brüggen in the 1960s were the most visible signs to a wider audience of thorough-going change in the interpretation of music from medieval to baroque times, there was no doubt in assigning a part of the general success to the work of the production teams behind the recordings.