Horn Concerto

It has been a long-standing dream of mine to write a horn concerto one day. I have loved the horn since my earliest youth. In Stefan Dohr I have found the ideal horn player to realise this dream. In many conversations and sessions with him, I was able to delve even deeper than before into the peculiarities and characteristics of the horn‘s sound.

The result is a 7-movement horn concerto lasting almost 40 minutes. The number seven has become a central number for me, at least since my Babylon opera. After the introductory Traumbild (dream picture), the second movement Andantino grazioso is characterised by my admiration for the music of Carl Maria von Weber – I lovingly circle and vary a theme from his Horn Concertino. In its exaggerated virtuosity, both for the horn and the orchestra, the third movement Scherzo à la surprise has a (deceptive) final character in itself. The emotional centrepiece, however, is the Adagietto, a movement for solo horn alone with strings, harp and celesta. In the fifth movement, Zwischenwelt (Intermediate World), the orchestra takes control of the action in dense clusters of sound until the movement sinks into alienated harmonic structures and fanfare gestures in sounds of noise and air. The enigmatic sixth movement Vorahnung (Premonition) is followed by one of the few genuine Finales I have written. Here, the attempt is made to bring together and concentrate elements from all the preceding movements and organically lead them into a condensation of the simultaneously dark and abysmal and exuberantly light.
Jörg WIdmann, in May 2024