Javier Bonet, La Real Cámara & Emilio Moreno - MOZART Natural Horn Concertos (2025)

Probably the most perfect version ever recorded of Mozart’s concertos with the incredibly difficult Natural Horn. The use of period instruments, a movement which began in the middle of the past century, is no longer a passing fad or something novel. Rather, it represents a fundamental part of our musical culture whose importance goes far beyond the simple nostalgic or poetic recreation of a score. The “archaic” technical characteristics of period instruments often force performers to seek solutions that, while resulting in a sound closer to historical reality, often surprise the listener. Technical constraints are even more evident in wind instruments, given that the significant evolution in their construction has accentuated the differences that emerged over the course of their development.

The survival of Mozart’s horn concertos after his death is the result of a partnership, supposedly encouraged by Haydn, between Mozart’s wife Constanze and the young composer-publisher, Johann André of Offenbach am Main. André had a genuine interest in Mozart’s music and was also eager to ensure the success of the publishing business which he had recently inherited from his father so the opportunity, in 1799, to buy all the manuscripts which Constanze had been left by the composer must have seemed too good to miss. As a result, on 8 November he and Constanze signed a contract under which André paid 2550 Florins for her collection of Mozart’s manuscripts and, in addition, undertook to give Constanze four free copies of each work as it was published.

Among these were the manuscripts, not all of them complete, of Mozart’s horn concertos. None of these had been published during the composer’s lifetime, and in 1800 André wrote again to Constanze because he anticipated producing a complete edition Mozart’s music and was concerned about missing portions of the manuscripts of the horn concertos K417 and K495. Constanze’s reply, dated 31 May, included a list of some fragments of horn concertos which she still had for sale and while André was only really interested in publishing complete works, he agreed to buy them as his interest in Mozart’s music went well beyond financial considerations.

The earliest of the works for horn in Constanze’s collection comprised some pages from a concerto in E flat which Mozart had written around March 1781 at about the time when he moved to Vienna. The score was incomplete: there was no slow movement, and the orchestration was unfinished, and as such, it was of little use to André. In 1856, on the centenary of his father’s birth, Carl Thomas Mozart compromised the music’s survival further by cutting up the pages of the first movement (a sketch known to Mozart scholars as “K370b”) and giving them away as souvenirs. During the twentieth century, musicologists gathered up the surviving fragments, and while a few bars are still missing, and Mozart only ever wrote what appears to be a sketch linking the end of the movement’s exposition to its recapitulation, enough survives to allow a convincing reconstruction to be made. As the Rondo appeared just to lack some of its orchestration, Breitkopf and Härtel published its sketches as K371 in their collected edition of Mozart’s works, and the first of many subsequent completions of the score was made around 1909 by the horn player and composer Henri Kling. The discovery of a further 60 bars in 1991, which are demonstrably a part of the same movement, revealed a piece that is more spacious and elegant than was previously thought and these are included in the performance on this recording. This two-movement concerto is performed here in a version by musicologist and pianist Robert Levin as K370b + 371.

Many of Mozart’s works for the horn were written to be played by his close friend, Joseph Leutgeb, who was said by the Mercure de France in 1770 to be so skilled at playing the instrument that he could “sing an adagio as perfectly as the most mellow, interesting and accurate voice.” However, Leutgeb denied all knowledge of this concerto when Constanze showed it to him, so it is possible that Mozart intended it to be played by the Munich horn player Franz Lang – Mozart had been in Munich immediately before he moved to Vienna – or by Jacob Eisen, the second (lower) horn player at the National Theatre in Vienna. The solo part of the concerto certainly seems to have been written for someone who specialised in the instrument’s lower register, and Constanze told André that Eisen’s widow had some horn music which Mozart had given to the player. However, in the same letter Constanze suggested that she herself had the manuscript of the Rondo, leaving the possibility that it was written for someone else and that Eisen’s widow had a different work in her possession. …

Javier Bonet, horn
LA REAL CÁMARA
Emilio Moreno, direction

TRACKLIST

1. Javier Bonet;Emilio Moreno;La Real Cámara - Horn Concerto in E-Flat Major, K. 370b: I. Allegro
2. Javier Bonet;Emilio Moreno;La Real Cámara - Horn Concerto in E-Flat Major, K. 370b: II. Rondeau - Allegro
3. Javier Bonet;Emilio Moreno;La Real Cámara - Horn Concerto No. 2 in E-Flat Major, K. 417: I. Allegro maestoso
4. Javier Bonet;Emilio Moreno;La Real Cámara - Horn Concerto No. 2 in E-Flat Major, K. 417: II. Andante
5. Javier Bonet;Emilio Moreno;La Real Cámara - Horn Concerto No. 2 in E-Flat Major, K. 417: III. Rondo. Più allegro
6. Javier Bonet;Emilio Moreno;La Real Cámara - Horn Concerto No. 4 in E-Flat Major, K. 495: I. Allegro maestoso
7. Javier Bonet;Emilio Moreno;La Real Cámara - Horn Concerto No. 4 in E-Flat Major, K. 495: II. Romance. Andante cantabile
8. Javier Bonet;Emilio Moreno;La Real Cámara - Horn Concerto No. 4 in E-Flat Major, K. 495: III. Rondo. Allegro vivace
9. Javier Bonet;Emilio Moreno;La Real Cámara - Horn Concerto No. 3 in E-Flat Major, K. 447: I. Allegro
10. Javier Bonet;Emilio Moreno;La Real Cámara - Horn Concerto No. 3 in E-Flat Major, K. 447: II. Romance. Larghetto
11. Javier Bonet;Emilio Moreno;La Real Cámara - Horn Concerto No. 3 in E-Flat Major, K. 447: III. Allegro
12. Javier Bonet;Emilio Moreno;La Real Cámara - Horn Concerto No. 1 in D Major, K. 412: I. Allegro
13. Javier Bonet;Emilio Moreno;La Real Cámara - Horn Concerto No. 1 in D Major, K. 412: II. Rondo. Allegro (1)
14. Javier Bonet;Emilio Moreno;La Real Cámara - Horn Concerto in E Major, K. 494a: Allegro (Fragment)
15. Javier Bonet;Emilio Moreno;La Real Cámara - Horn Concerto No. 1 in D Major, K. 412: II. Rondo. Allegro (2)