The ECONOMIST a highly respect news magazine ran this review http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/offer.cfm?campaign=168-XLMT
BLOWHARD Nov 27th 2008 ABOUT to turn 40 and bruised by the end of his marriage, Jasper Rees, a British journalist, climbed up to his attic and found a misshapen case containing his childhood nemesis: a French horn. Quite where the insane idea of playing a concerto before the annual gathering of most of the greatest living horn players came from is hard to tell, but the result is a marvellous memoir of a year's obsession that should be read by anyone gripped by illogical compulsion. What sets the horn apart? First and foremost, it is the sound--"a call of nature, an atavistic summons"--directly descended from the clamour that brought down the walls of Jericho. Then there is the astonishing difficulty of consistently hitting the right notes, let alone making music. Mr Rees, whose book came out in Britain in January and is now being published in America (and turned into a stage show in London), introduces the greatest players. First comes Giovanni Punto, an 18th-century Bohemian who became the subject of an aristocratic FATWA requiring the removal of his front teeth when he had the temerity to leave his boss Count Joseph von Thun's employment without permission. Then there was Mozart's friend Joseph Leutgeb (to whom Mozart dedicated his horn concerto, K417, calling him "ass, ox and simpleton"). There are three generations of Brains, a British horn-playing dynasty; Helen Kotas, the first woman to be principal horn player for a major American orchestra; Herman Baumann and the Anglo-Australian, Barry Tuckwell. What they all share is an absolute certainty that the horn is an instrument like no other. Richard Strauss called for "lots of horns, which are always a yardstick for heroism". Sir Simon Rattle puts it differently: "You never eyeball a horn player. You just don't. They're stuntmen. You don't eyeball stuntmen when they're about to dice with death." A Devil To Play: One Man's Year-Long Quest to Master the Orchestra's Most Difficult Instrument. By Jasper Rees. Harper; 324 pages; $23.99. Published in Britain as "I Found My Horn"; Weidenfeld and Nicolson; GBP14.99 Weidenfeld & Nicolson _______________________________________________ post: horn@music.memphis.edu unsubscribe or set options at http://music2.memphis.edu/mailman/options/horn/archive%40jab.org
