SubCategory Archive (tags): ‘Excerpts’

Peter and the Wolf: Catching a Horn Section by its Tail

PUBLISHED: November 23, 2011, Bruce Hembd

A common factor among many working orchestral professionals is cyclical repertoire – music that comes up on a performance calendar more than once, sometimes on a yearly basis. This time of year especially, musicians are looking ahead at a December calendar full of Nutcracker or Messiah or other holiday-related gigs. Another regular staple that gets repeated [...]

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Excerpts

Re-Writing Bach: The Trio from Brandenburg Concerto No. 1

PUBLISHED: October 5, 2011, Bruce Hembd

I have been working on the final Trio section from Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 1, not for a specific performance but rather as an exercise for technical improvement in tonguing, the high range and endurance. While working on this excerpt I remembered a neat performance trick – one that can be very helpful to a first [...]

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Clams, Excerpts, Tips

A Glimpse into the Horn I Book of the Duo Operas ‘Cav and Pag’

PUBLISHED: September 28, 2011, Bruce Hembd

For the first production of the 2011-2012 Arizona Opera season, I am bumping up from third to principal horn on a pairing of two operas: Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. This is a traditional pairing that gives a principal horn lots to do and today I will feature a few interesting passages and highlights. [...]

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Playing in orchestra

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Excerpts, Opera

Hornmasters Interlude: Repertoire to Practice

PUBLISHED: July 26, 2011, John Ericson

While Farkas in The Art of French Horn Playing does address the topic of etude study in the section on practice, he did not address the topics of what solo and orchestral works are the most important to study. This is a story that is repeated in most of the classic horn methods written since [...]

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Excerpts

Siegfried Horn Calls from Götterdämmerung

PUBLISHED: March 18, 2011, Bruce Hembd

To wrap up my series on the Siegfried horn calls within Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, today’s article features the calls in Wagner’s final opera in the cycle, Götterdämmerung. The short call of course is something that most horn players are familiar with. The Prelude and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey is a fairly common staple [...]

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Excerpts, Opera, Siegfried

The ‘Bonus Notes’ of Dvořák’s 7th Symphony

PUBLISHED: January 14, 2011, Bruce Hembd

Of all the symphonies of Antonin Dvořák my favorite is the 7th. While his 9th symphony is epic and immensely more popular, and the 8th has its strong appeal, the horn parts and the Romantic sweep of the 7th really hit home for me. And – in the final measures there is typically an extra [...]

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Excerpts, Orchestra

Horn in A in Italian ‘Bel Canto’ Opera: Rossini’s Semiramide

PUBLISHED: January 12, 2011, Bruce Hembd

In “Sometimes Up is Down” I spelled out some pitfalls in performing Italian operatic repertoire. For Horn in A: The basic “A-horn” rule-of-thumb for the 3rd hornist is this: If your “up” transposition puts your sounding pitches above the 1st horn, you most likely need to invert the interval transposition to sound below the 1st [...]

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Excerpts, Opera, Orchestra, Transposition