Richard Strauss, Horn Concerto No. 2 in E Flat

No. 53 means that we are starting a second year of Friday Performance Picks. We have covered a lot of ground in the past year in terms of musical eras, styles, and genres. But you don’t achieve musical understanding just by covering a lot of different works. You should look for things that strike your interest, and then dig deeper and listen more closely. Listening repeatedly to a handful of musical works will pay better dividends than listening only once or twice to many works.

So focus first on really getting to know a handful of works. As you become thoroughly familiar with a work, set it aside for a while and move on to another work. When you come back to a work you really learned, even after quite a long while, you may be surprised at how well you remember it. One of the commentators in our courses described it as coming across an old friend.

Because I’m a former horn player, I want to start the new year with Richard Strauss’s Horn Concerto No. 2. When people asked what instrument I played, and I said horn, many would rhapsodize about how they love the sound. (I rarely got such remarks when I was a pianist.) Horn has a mystique. It’s not that it’s so difficult. All instruments are in real sense equally difficult because composers exploit the limits of what each instrument can do. But the horn is treacherous, and composers have not written a lot of works that feature solo horn in a virtuosic role.

The real gems of the horn repertoire tend to be found in late Romantic symphonies and opera and 20th-century orchestral works: Wagner, Mahler, Stravinsky, Shostakovich (to name a few), and Strauss. This was the time that the modern valved horn came into use, and these composers explored the limits of what horn could do and put the horn in a starring role in the orchestral repertoire. But Strauss also wrote two horn concertos harking back to the classical form. They were written 60 years apart, the second in 1942 when Strauss was 78.