Volume 7 - Roland Horvath “Horn und Tuba”
Logo by Martha Blanks
For this installment of Horn on Record we journey into the furthest reaches of our repertoire, thanks to one of many recordings made by Austrian hornist Roland Horvath. On the album “Horn und Tuba, two instruments – two interpreters – two composers”, Horvath is joined by a cadre of collaboratoring musicians performing music for horn and piano, horn and two guitars, and tuben quartet with bass tuba!
While no recording date is documented for this album, Horvath made a great many recordings for Aricord Digital all dating from the early 1980’s that extend across the standard repertoire for horn and piano, as well as chamber combinations of both horn with voice, with harp, and with cello. This particular recording features Roland Horvath dedicating performances to two of his fellow Austrian composers – Konrad Musalek and Kurt Anton Hueber.
Roland Horvath, born in Vienna in 1945, attended the Theresian Academy and studied math and general music education, which lead to an early appointment teaching music theory at the University of Performing Arts in Vienna. He concurrently studied many aspects of music – horn with Gottfried von Freiberg, Leopold Kainz, and Josef Velba, in addition to piano, violin, guitar, singing, composition, and conducting.
Horvath began playing professionally with the Vienna Radio Orchestra in 1965, and then subsequently joined the Vienna State Opera Orchestra in 1966, followed by the the Vienna Philharmonic in 1981. He has been very active as an ambassador for our instrument, having served as the President of the Wiener Waldhornverein (the oldest horn association in the world), Advisory Council of the International Horn Society (1987-1993) and Vice President (1991-92), and also President of the Austrian-Korean Music Association. He performed and presented at horn symposium across the world throughout the 1980s-1990s, and has also composed and arranged several works for horn, including “Der Ring des Nibelungen – Fantasy for Horn and Piano”.
The A-side of the album features three interwoven works by Konrad Musalek, a composer and music theorician who taught at the Pädagogische Akademie and Franz-Schubert-Konservatorium in Vienna. As noted on the album jacket, Musalek characterizes his style as “free atonal and ametrical which means that it is not based on a scale and has no rhythmical patterns.”
These three short works are all meditations on the same opening motive – a brief, 16-note horn call that musically evokes a short question and answer. This is, perhaps, Musalek’s own contemporary musing on the idée fixe used by both Berlioz and Balzac in the 1830’s.
The opening of Musalek’s Sonate für Horn und Klavier, Op. 35 has three moments in quick sucession: the purposeful 16-note motive, a rapid layering of this motive with a churning and relentless piano overlay, and a sudden expansion of time through a expressive and restive horn candenza. Horvath uses vigorous articulation and a broad, sustained style to maintain the presence of the horn motive:
Quite an oddity for chamber pairing, Musalek’s Sonate für Horn and zwei Gitarren, op. 92 continues his manipulation of the 16-note motive, but includes many percussive elements from the guitarists as well. The interplay and phasing of the dual guitar accompaniments lends this piece an almost improvisatory feel:
On the albums B-side we encounter two multi-movement works for Tuben quartet and Bass tuba, both by Kurt Anton Heuber. Also in the realm of an avant-garde compositional style, Heuber notes that his music “began with linear polyphonic and tonal structures and developed to twelve-tone compositions and non-harmonic systems.”
In his Osiris Hymnus, Op. 27, based on an Egyptian poem, the Tuben quartet plays with a sinewy and singular sound, melding together this complex and interwoven melody. This quartet features Roland Horvath alongside long-time Vienna Philharmonic hornists and colleagues Roland Berger, Willibald Janezic, and Wolfgang Tömbock:
The last selection, Heuber’s Reqiuem, op 21 interestingly doesn’t include Roland Horvath in the ensemble. Regardless, this is music of probing intensity and compositional intrigue. The performers clearly draw on their legacy of Brucknerian repertoire to balance and blend with the bass tuba, creating a consort sound that is deftly tuned and quintessential in sound color!
This program of music, beautifully and effectively played by Roland Horvath, reminds us that the extent of our music catalog is vast indeed! Especially as these chamber pairings can be difficult to facilitate (not one…but two guitarists?), it’s that much more valuable to have these foundational recordings preserved. And that’s what we do here at Horn on Record!