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 amp; Nicolson
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