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Although we all know it is coming soon, I was recently struck by the statement “The CD really is dead” in a post in the Polyphonic.org blog by Robert Levine under the title “The times they are a’changin…”
A lot of things are changing out there to be sure. The fact that you are reading this article on Horn Matters is yet another evidence of the revolution underway in the arts. Our traffic has been growing steadily this past year and what we write is aimed for online rather than print consumption. In the same ways that print publications are on the way out the CD as a format is also on the way out, which is a huge change in how we think and create projects in music. Recordings to this point have often been put out with an overall concept in mind, but now people tend to just buy tracks.
With that context in mind I have been meaning for some time to feature three different CD horn orchestral excerpt projects that it would be great for horn students to keep in mind for excerpt study while we are still in an era when CDs are easy to buy and use.
OrchestraPro: Horn
This was I believe the original recording of this type and format. It is at present listed in iTunes as “Orchestral Excerpts for Horn” and was recorded and narrated by David Krehbiel, former Principal Horn of the San Francisco Symphony and prior to that of the Detroit and Chicago symphonies. This project includes recordings of twenty major excerpts with insightful commentary and is available from Summit Records (cover image source) and other sources.
Audition: Improbable
Not long after the Krehbiel project another appeared featuring Roger Kaza, then of the Houston Symphony but at present Principal Horn in St. Louis, with a cast of characters including William Ver Meulen, Brian Thomas, Philip Stanton, and Bruce Henniss. The setup is that Audition: Improbable is a conference or workshop lecture by “Professor Bruno von Hornigschnegel” that features secretly recorded selections from the finals of a major orchestra audition. The information included is spot on and presented in a very entertaining format. Of these CDs, this is my favorite.
The Horn in Opera
The most recent of these projects is The Horn in Opera by Richard Chenoweth, Professor of Horn at the University of Dayton and for 35 years second hornist with the Santa Fe Opera. This came out in 2008 and includes excerpts from 19 different operas. This is more in the style of the Krehbiel project but with a bit more depth. There is much more on this recording and the content in The Horn in Opera website, the source of this cover image.
The Future?
All three of these projects are certainly worth buying and to my mind really are best heard as physical CDs. Any of them if you were to just cherry pick out a few tracks you will pick up something but there is a bigger picture in all that you can only pick up listening to the whole recording top to bottom in order. The Krehbiel is available as a download in iTunes and if you buy it there buy the whole album! So far as I can tell the others are not available as downloads. Perhaps they will be in the future or might someday be converted to a web-based format. All three though are ones that students of the horn should be aware of and make use of today.
