Here's my latest addition to the ever increasing collection of fortnightly videos as part of my #CornoNotCorona project. You can watch the performance here: • Anneke Scott performs ...
This week I’ve decided to get out an instrument made by August Dennstädt of Mühltroff Germany sometime in the first half of the twentieth century, mainly as I’m due to play it in a couple of weeks and wanted to get some practice done! I would describe this as a type of althorn but that is a term that can cause a lot of confusion. Althorn and/or alto horn could maybe mean something like this instrument my Courtois alto saxhorn or even my Althorn in E-flat by Franz Xaver Hüller. Some countries/periods call these tenor horns which adds to the confusion.
The Courtois alto saxhorn and the Dennstädt are very similar in construction - the main difference being that the Courtois points up the Dennstädt points forward, also the Courtois has piston valves and the Dennstädt has rotary valves.
The piece I decided to play this week is the opening movement of Hindemith’s Althorn sonata. This work was written in 1943 as is part of the series of instrumental sonatas that Hindemith composed between 1935 and 1955. Hindemith explained to his publisher why he set out to write these works:
“You will be surprised that I am writing sonatas for all the wind instruments. I already wanted to write a whole series of these pieces. First of all, there's nothing decent for these instruments except for a few classical things; although not from the present business perspective, it is meritorious over the long term to enrich this literature. And secondly, since I myself have been so interested in playing wind instruments, I have great pleasure in these pieces. Finally, they are serving me as a technical exercise for the big punch with which the ‹Harmonie der Welt› [...] can hopefully be begun in the spring”
Often horn players steal this work and play it on the modern French horn, also alto saxophone players have been known to play as have modern day tenor horn players, it but I wanted to try and get closer to the sort of althorn that Hindemith himself had. It's quite rare to hear it on an althorn - though Teunis van der Zwart and pianist Alexander Melnikov have recorded it here: www.harmoniamundi.com/#!/albu....
If you go to the Fondation Hindemith website (www.hindemith.info/en/life-wo...) you’ll see photos of Hindemith playing his “althorn” - Hindemith owned a wonderfully named Rothcorno contralto made by Guiseppe Pelitti, Milano, and marked with "Brevetto Bottali“. I’m really grateful to my colleague Ulrich Hübner who has had access to this instrument and kindly filled me in about what he learnt about Hindemith and this instrument. (www.hindemith.info/en/cabinet... If you click on the concert listing, September 3rd, 2017 there’s some nice photos of Uli and the pianist Christoph Ullrich).
The Rothcorno was designed by Ferdinando Roth in 1908 and follows in a long tradition of instruments being named after their makers, think saxophone and saxhorns named after Adolphe Sax, sarrusophone by Sarrus, sudraphone by Sudre bimboniphone by Bimboni. If you want to check these names out further there’s an excellent list of such neologism in Ignance de Keyser’s “The construction of the Genius in 19th century music” (core.ac.uk/download/pdf/33759.... The Rothcorno is a forward facing instrument like my Dennstädt, they also both have rotary valves, but the Rothcorno is more oval in shape. You can find some catalogue images of the Rothcorno here: www.14-18.it/spartito/misc_d_2...
Uli pointed out that Hindemith’s instrument didn’t seem to be a basic model, for example it has particularly nice engravings, with nickel silver and mother of pearl trimmings. It’s also not clear how Hindemith got the instrument though Uli told me there is a story that Gertrud, Hindemith’s wife, gave him a “horn” as a birthday present whilst they were in exile in Switzerland in the late 1930s but that this was described as second hand, old and cheap. So whether this was the Rothcorno or not is uncertain.
The Rothcorno was designed to be in either F or E flat, some would be, like this instrument I’m playing today, built in F and then you could add a crook to take it down to Eb. Some appear to take a regular French horn mouthpiece, others, like the instrument I’m playing today, take a bigger more saxhorn like mouthpiece.
So to recap - this week - we’ve got a German forward facing althorn in Eb, the closest thing I have to Hindemith’s own Rothcorno, for playing the opening movement of Hindemith’s althorn sonata from 1943.
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29 май 2021
