When Dennis Brain was killed in a car accident while driving home to London after an appearance at the 1957 Edinburgh Festival, his mantle fell naturally on Barry Tuckwell. There were other fine British players of course, not least Alan Civil, but Tuckwell’s flowing beauty of line and timbre, natural elegance of phrasing and complete mastery of the most intractable of all orchestral instruments soon gave him a pre-eminent position as concerto soloist. This year he undertakes his final concert tour before retirement so it is timely of EMI to have issued this inexpensive Forte collection of nearly a dozen fine concertos, recorded between 1974 and 1981.
Tuckwell’s easy bravura is readily demonstrated in the first movement of the opening concerto here, by Telemann. Its catchy moto perpetuo is dispatched with aplomb; then comes a fine Adagio which often moves to the very top of the horn’s upper range and creates a tension that is released in the buoyant finale. The Cherubini sonata opens with a melancholy Largo, then erupts into joyous high spirits, while the racing opening arpeggios of the concerto by Leopold Mozart and the tight trills in the finale (with harpsichord echoes) are managed with comparable exuberance. The Weber is an attractively diverse and extensive (17-minute) set of variations and includes a good example of horn ‘chords’, where the soloist plays one note and hums another; it also has an exceptionally joyful finale. One of the novelties is a delightful concerto by the virtually unknown Christoph Forster (1693-1745). The work has an amiable first movement, marked Con discrezione, a brief, disconsolate Adagio and a closing Rondo where, although the clouds clear away, the lyrical feeling remains. In some respects most striking of all is the collection of four concertos by the Bohemian musician, Giovanni Punto, a successful, highly cultivated composer and horn virtuoso whose music is enjoyably distinctive – a mixture of Mozartian influences and Hummelian galant bonhomie. The individual CD of these four works was first issued to celebrate Barry Tuckwell’s fiftieth birthday and the performances show him at his finest, so their inclusion here is highly appropriate.
With his Academy of St Martin in the Fields on top form, Marriner conducts elegant, polished accompaniments throughout, except in the works by Joseph and Michael Haydn where Tuckwell directs the ECO himself. The analogue recordings, all made at Abbey Road, are first-rate – smooth, warm and vivid and beautifully balanced. '