Preview Brahms Horn Trio
Treat yourself to some lunch hour culture
Preview: Brahms Horn Trio
Other Recent Preview Articles
Like the Monday lunchtime organ recitals at Leeds Town Hall, the Wednesday chamber music series at The Venue offer city centre workers splendid programmes from burgeoning or experienced soloists and ensembles at no charge whatever. They are simply too good to ignore.
Richard Bayliss studied French horn with Derek Taylor and Andrew Clark at the Royal Academy of Music. Taylor gives him an educational pedigree that can be traced all the way back through Aubrey Brain to the legendary Adolf Borsdorf, who, having landed on these shores to play at Covent Garden in the 1870s, combined elements of the German and French schools in his teaching and gave the British a unique style of playing for which we are noted worldwide even today. Clark is a remarkable and persuasive exponent of the valveless natural horn, an instrument whose sound Brahms considered superior to any subsequent valved version. The technology of the valve certainly completed a full range of notes and facilitated a flexibility in playing that had been hitherto unattainable, but the composer studied the natural horn as a youth and savoured its tonal beauties, despite its restrictions.
Nevertheless, it is doubtful whether his Trio for piano, violin and horn has ever been played on the instrument he intended, but Bayliss, through his tutors, will surely be familiar with the sound that Brahms expected to hear and will know how to get very close to it.
Brahms, of course, had studied piano and violin as well, so he wrote with assurance for the horn’s companions in this piece. Pianist Sam Haywood, who is well known on the concert stage and recording studio as a solo artist, is also the regular accompanist to cellist Steven Isserlis and there is a projected tour of Europe and the United States next year with Joshua Bell. Violinist Arisa Fujita teaches at the Guildhall, but is also a familiar and lauded performer on the London circuit.
11 November, The Venue, Leeds College of Music, 3 Quarry Hill, LS2 7PD, 0113 222 3400, 1.05pm, free
Posted on Wednesday 14th October 2009
TT
Sending you to Twitter, hold on... 
