Luogo e data di registrazione		- Vereenigte Doopsgezinde Kerk, Haarlen (The Netherlands) - 11/13 september 1992 - (2-10) - Glenn Gould studio, Toronto (Canada) - 2/3 May 1993 (1,11,12)
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Recording supervisor		Wolf Erichson
	Recording Engineers / Editing		Peter Laenger & Markus Heiland (Tritonus)
	Prima Edizione LP		-
	Prima Edizione CD		Sony / Vivarte - SK 53 369 - (1 CD) - durata 63' 30" - (p) 1993 - DDD
	Cover Art		Michaelsplatz in Salzburg by Anonymous (18th century) - Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin
	Note		-

Mozart tailored his arias and concertos to the specific abilities of his soloists. In the eighteenth century, com-osers seemed to adhere to the adage that the better the soloist sounded, the greater the benefit to the composer - an attitude whose gradual fall from favor began with Beethoven. In the case of Mozart's horn works, we can distinguish the musicians for whom individual pieces were written by the range and type of writing they contain. Mozart's first work to demand ambitious chromatic writing for the horn is the Divertimento in D, K. 131 of 1772, which calls for four horns. It was to be almost nine years, however, before he was to write a horn concerto. During the trip from Salzburg to Vienna that Mozart undertook in 1781 as part of Archbishop Colloredo's retinue, Mozart seems to have met the hornist Jacob Eisen (1756-1796). In March 1781 he drafted a two-movement concerto in E flat major for Eisen. It is probable that the entire horn part of the first movement was written out. However, the scoring is limited to sketching during orchestral sections and to an occasional contrapuntal passage. This is Mozart's characteristic way of reminding himself of his concept in order to save time for the later task of filling in the orchestration. Alas, Mozart was never to get to that phase in this concerto. Its first movement, K. 370b, was cut up in pieces by Mozart's son Carl, so that part of the recapitulation is missing. The second movement is commonly known as the Concert Rondo in E flat, K. 371. Mozart's draft was long ago scored up in a version that conflicts with many elements of his style and grammar; but this has not prevented the piece from becoming a staple of concerts and recordings. What is utterly remarkable is that a double leaf containing 60 measures of the autograph (comprising virtually the entire exposition!) became separated from the rest of the manuscript some time between Mozart's death and 1799 and did not surface until 1990, when it was purchased at a Sotheby's auction and is now reunited with the rest of the movement at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. The complete draft has yet to appear in print; a first instrumentation of the entire work, prepared by Erik Smith, appeared in a 1991 recording. My orchestration, prepared especially for the recording on this CD, was undertaken with a belief that Mozart is likely to have used a more transparent and simpler scoring. Apart from a concerto fragment in E major, the rest of Mozart`s horn concertos were written for Joseph Leutgeb (1732-1811), whom the Mozart family knew in Salzburg and whose virtuosity on the horn was known in Paris as well as Vienna. Leutgeb opened a cheese shop in Vienna and was the butt of constant jokes from Mozart, who composed his Horn Quintet in E flat, K. 407/386c and four concertos for Leutgeb. The first of these is the one commonly called the Concerto No. 2, K. 417. It is in E flat major, considered in the 18th century to be the best key for the natural horn because of the crook size used. The concerto is dated as follows: “Wolfgang Amadé Mozart has taken pity upon the ass, ox and fool Leitgeb, in Vienna on May 27, 1783.” The score calls for pairs of oboes and horns,and strings. The differences between Eisen's and Leutgeb's techniques is immediately apparent. Whereas Eisen played down to low C in the bass clef (sounding E flat), no work for Leutgeb goes below the G a fifth above that (sounding B flat) and its muted tone F sharp (sounding A-natural). On the other hand Leutgeb had a good high register, easily playing fast one-octave scales to written high C (sounding E flat); these are missing in the music for Eisen and in the horn part to the Quintet for Piano and Windinstruments in E flat, K. 452 (1784). Three years after K. 417 Mozart wrote another «oncerto for Leutgeb, again in E flat - the so-called Concerto No. 4, K. 495. The autograph is written in four different colours of ink (black, blue, red and green). Traditionally taken as a joke, it has been claimed by Franz Giegling, editor of the Horn Concertos for the New Mozart-Edition (Neue Mozart- Ausgabe) that Mozart was using an elegant color code to indicate the importance and colouring of the individual passages. The concerto is dated June 26, 1786 in Mozart's autograph thematic catalogue (“A Waldhorn concerto for Leitgeb”), but not all of the manuscript has come down to us, and the first movement survives in three different versions (218, 175 and 229 bars long), of which the first is the one commonly performed. Like K. 417, K. 495 is scored for oboes, horns and strings, .md it likewise features Leutgeb's octave scales in the first movement, a cantabile triple-meter middle movement in B flat and a rollicking 6/8 hunting- horn finale. Mozart seems to have written Leutgeb another concerto about a year later (1787); this work, the Concerto No. 3, was dated 1783 by Köchel and given the number K. 447 because Mozart did not include it in his thematic catalogue, whose first entry (K. 449) is February 9, 1784. However, there are a number of other works omitted by Mozart from the catalogue, and paper and handwriting studies of Alan Tyson and Wolfgang Plath have suggested the 1787 dating. Leutgeb's name appears in the autograph at two spots in the finale. There is a significant evolution in the language of K. 447, and in its scoring and writing. Instead of oboes and horns Mozart prescribes clarinets and bassoons, giving the solo horn more timbral focus. The middle movement, a Romance in A flat, is more substantial than those of K. 417 and K. 495, and the harmonic language, particularly of the first movement, shows an audacity and personal voice that reflect the post-Figaro development of Mozart's style. It also reflects the beginning of the decline in Leutgeb's technique. He was 55 in 1787 and apparently no longer able to dash off the octave scales of his prime: Mozart cuts the top register down a third to written A (sounding C) and skillfully allows the orchestra to play animated music while the horn moves from long note to long note (the development of the first movement). In 1791, the year of his death, Mozart began a last concerto for Leutgeb, this time in D major. This work, known as Concerto No. 1 (K. 412), underwent a series of stages. Mozart seems to have drafted its two movements before discovering that at 59 Leutgeb was no longer able to play low notes. He therefore revised the first movement to bring it within the melodic compass of a ninth in mid-register. However, Mozart died before carrying out this process on the Rondo, which contains the same low notes as the previous three concertos. Thus, it remained a draft like the Concert Rondo, K. 371. The manuscript contains running insults to Leutgeb, and the horn part is labeled Adagio to the orchestra`s Allegro. It was left to Mozart's amanuensis Franz Xaver Süßmayr (1766-1803), whose primary claim to fame is his cornpletion of the Requiem, K. 626, to rewrite Mozart`s draft so that Leutgeb could play it. In doing so, Süßmayr inexplicably ignored Mozart's accompaniment, replacing it with a coarser texture replete with grammatical errors. Furthermore, Süßmayr overlooked Mozart's wind scoring for the first movement - oboes and bassoons. (This was easy to do, because for most of the movement the winds were notated on a separate piece of paper.) Süßmayr used only oboes in the Finale. Most remarkable of all, he substantially rewrote not just the solo horn part, but the entire movement. Particularly striking is the inclusion of a quotation from the Gregorian Chant of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, which is traditionally sung on Good Friday. Süßmayr's autograph of the movement, which is dated Good Friday, April 6, 1792, was misread by Köchel as 1797. Assuming the manuscript to be Mozart's handwriting, Köchel took the year for a joke and redated the work April 6, 1787 because that was the only year in Mozart's lifetime that Good Friday fell on April 6. That is the origin of the number K. 514 that traditionally has been given to the Rondo. It was the British musicologist Alan Tyson who revealed in 1980 that Mozart's completed first movement and draft of the second were on paper from 1790/91, that the completion of the Rondo is by Süßmayr, and that its true dating is 1792. Today`s hornist is not bound by Leutgeb's lack of teeth, so that it seemed legitimate to restore the passage in the first movement that contains the low notes Leutgeb apparently wanted removed. This gives the two movements the same range. I have supplied a new instrumentation of the Rondo with the proper scoring, again trying to avoid overly busy or fancy textures. © 1993 Robert D. Levin A WORD FROM THE SOLOIST When people spoke of the horn in Mozart's day, they meant the natural horn, an instrument most closely comparable to the hunting horn that is still used today in certain circumstances. Unlike the modern horn, it still had no valves, so that the performer could initially play only the notes of the harmonic series of its fundamental note. By about 1750, however, a technique had been developed making it possible to play the intervening notes as well: by placing his hand in the instrument's bell, the player was now in a position to supplement these missing notes. As a result of this technique of “stopping” the notes the player was able to produce the timbre characteristic of the natural horn. The pitch of the fundamental note of the natural horn (the K. 447 Horn Concerto, for example, is in E flat major, whereas K. 412 is notated in D major) can be altered by means of “crooks”. A longer crook produces a deeper basic pitch, a shorter one a higher pitch. The majority of Classical horn concertos are written in F, E flat or D, since these keys come very close to the human voice in their tonal characteristics. Although the development of a much more sophisticated key mechanism meant that woodwind instruments were able to play chromatic notes and were thus technically far in advance of the horn in Mozart's day, Mozart wrote far more solo works for the natural horn than for any other brass or wind instrument. There may be two reasons for this: first, the tonal colour of the natural horn had a particular fascination for Mozart from his earliest youth onwards and, second, the composer appears to have been influenced by the art of the horn player, Joseph Ignaz Leutgeb, who was regarded as one of the leading horn virtuosos of his day and with whom Mozart had been on friendly terms since his time in Salzburg. Even today, Mozart's horn concertos, although written for the natural horn, remain the cornerstone of the solo repertory of the modern valve horn, too. For the present recording I have used a natural horn (with the original crooks) built by Ignaz Lorenz of Linz during the first half of the nineteenth century. It is an instrument that is part of the Austrian tradition and one whose tone must have been in Mozart's mind when he worked on his horn concertos. Ab Koster (Translation: © 1993 Stewart Spencer)