Soloists Matt Reynolds, Bethany Zane, Darby
Hinshaw & Alex Camphouse
[This review will appear in the Salinas Californian on
Monday, February 19]
There were four (count ‘em four) French horns on stage at the
Monterey Symphony’s Sherwood Hall concert last night, and did they ever kick
up a storm! We were hearing a rare work, the Konzertstück in F Major for
Four Horns and Orchestra by Robert Schumann, and it is a knockout. If you
are considering taking up a musical instrument in your spare time, forget
about horn, take piano lessons instead, for horn is such a super difficult
instrument to learn and play well, it’s best left to the pros. Well, we just
happened to have four pros in our midst last night as Monterey Symphony
principal horn Alex Camphouse was joined by Darby Hinshaw, Bethany Zane and
Matt Reynolds to make up a quartet of soloists that just about blew the roof
off at Sherwood Hall.
Although this work is called “Konzertstück,” (concert piece), it is
indeed a concerto, and very possibly the first horn concerto ever written. A
lot of the fun in this performance was watching the interplay as themes
ricocheted back and forth between the players. Several times we heard
fragments repeated up and down the line in rapid succession, one after the
other, like a Busby Berkeley chorus line. It was fun!
What was not so much fun was the opening selection of the evening,
Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll.
Maestro Max Bragado-Darman drew some beautiful sounds out of the
Monterey Symphony’s string and wind sections and individual soloists turned
in lovely performances. However, the piece just went on and on and never
seemed to end. Ultimately it
came across as a collection of beautiful effects, whose length of 20 minutes
seemed like 30.
Finishing off the evening we heard a boisterous performance of
Beethoven’s ever popular Fifth Symphony. Perhaps no performance of this
symphony is subtle, except, of course in the heavenly slow movement where
you find out how softly the individual players can play. However, no matter
how many times you have heard this great symphony, it never fails to make a
grand effect, and so it did on this occasion.
More than one person was heard exiting the hall humming the great
seminal motive “da da da dum.”
End
