The Night Shift at The George Tavern

The music in this concert will include pieces by Gonoud, Handel, Hahn, Mozart, La Corrette, Panseron, Rossini, Rameau, plus excerpts from Brahms, Verdi and Weber.

It’s the orchestral hero you didn’t know we needed! Martin Lawrence explores why the low horn is more significant than you might have previously thought.

Welcome to the magical, plangent, ghostly world of the ‘cor basse’. From the alphorn to Brahms, operatic cameos to Mozart’s Horn Concertos, Martin and a string quartet, will guide you through the specialist art of low horn playing.

This difference has now become known as 1st and 2nd horn. As the OAE’s 2nd horn, Martin says he needs to point out that there is nothing historically that implies any inferiority for the low specialist! Indeed, many of the significant solo pieces over the years were written for cor basse, including two of Mozart’s horn concertos and Beethoven’s horn sonata, and the low player was considered the expert in the hand-horn technique used to fill in the gaps in the harmonic series in the lower register. We’ll take a plunge into the specialist lower crooks and what gives this range of instruments their own particular sound, utterly different from the modern horn.

Martin will be joined by Matthew Truscott and Nia Lewis (violins), Martin Kelly (viola) and Catherine Rimer (cello).