Hornist
Peter Damm and organist
Hansjürgen Scholze have put together a very attractive program of original music and transcriptions from the Baroque and Modern eras. (Several of the works were written well into the eighteenth century, but their sensibility is far more Baroque than Classical.)
Damm plays a natural horn with such finesse and evenness that it could reasonably be mistaken for a valve horn; his trills are a particular pleasure, both agile and limpid.
Damm's playing sounds more French than German; his bright, almost trumpet-like tone and use of vibrato set him apart from the more mellow and robust German style. It's well suited to this repertoire, where a clean, clarion sound works well in the reverberant recording environment of the Catholic Cathedral of Dresden. The Cathedral's exceptionally rich eighteenth century organ is a star of the recording; it's an instrument Mozart admired highly, and it's easy to tell why. (It survived the Dresden bombings because it had been removed to a rural abbey during the Second World War.)
Scholze's playing is immaculate, and he uses the instrument's huge coloristic range inventively. Many of the Baroque-era works are essentially chorale preludes, with the horn playing the cantus firmus, and the effect is majestic and lovely. The
Poulenc Elegie in memory of Dennis Brain is the most familiar piece on the recording, but
Damm's searing performance gives it a wailing anguish that makes it sound freshly imagined. The sound is warm and rich, but manages to be crisp as well; the engineers beautifully capture the resonance of the Cathedral, which has an echo time of up to nine seconds, without ever letting it sound murky.