The Dvorak Serenade for Winds, Op. 44 is a wonderful work I’ve played a few times.
The most memorable performance certainly was for a recording session at IU, with a group that was mostly IU faculty. For this the horn section was:
- Myron Bloom
- John Ericson
- Michael Hatfield
Playing with style
At the time I was the horn studio AI and I was a student of Mr. Hatfield. I had played by then a few things with Mr. Bloom too, and let me say this: he could play with clear style. He played like he meant it, led with a style that showed clearly he was very confident of what he wanted. The rhythm, in particular, was very vital and on top of the beat. As you would expect from a player that among other things had served as Principal Horn of the Cleveland Orchestra for 20+ years.
On three different horns
So, at the recording session Bloom had three (!!!) horns with him. One was an Elkhart 8D (probably 300,000 series), one was an Eastlake 8D that he had borrowed from a current student of his (!), and the final horn was an Alexander 103! He loved looking at that horn, how it was made just so, etc.
Meanwhile, I’m playing on my 500,000 series 8D with who knows what mouthpiece. At some point in the session he told me that my horn sounded good but it was unplayable, I needed something else. I had no idea what to do with that info, as I didn’t have any alternate horn.
Oh, and Hatfield used his Lawson-modified Holton 180 with his drilled out Holton MDC mouthpiece.
How Bloom and his three horns played out in the session is he used all of them, and at least one movement he played on two different horns. It was still not a problem to play in tune with him on any of them, and I think I could match his style pretty well. I recall he was actually a little less emphatic about the placement and style of the 1/16 notes than my Verne Reynolds training would have me default.
By the way, the recording was, so far as I know, never released. My memory is that the end of the work clearly had no good take. Bloom didn’t hit it but didn’t ask to do more takes to fix it, and the conductor did not push the issue. Playing on three different horns may hot have helped that situation.
Fast forward to this week
I’ve started rehearsals here for the Dvorak Serenade again, with our ASU Chamber Winds group, with me joining them as guest principal horn.
I’m having interesting memories of the IU version.
Trying three (four) horns
One of the flashbacks to the Bloom recording is that I’ve seriously tried three horns out for this performance. I can relate to his horn dilemma. Each horn does have a distinct character, unique strengths and weaknesses that make them easier or harder to play on certain passages.
You might ask at this point, how many horns do I own? Really, too many, but most of them are historic or historic style instruments (natural horns, single F horns, etc.). But I do have four playable double horns.
What I found is that, besides playing differences in the slurs and such, there is strong mechanical aspect of the left hand finger position that impacts accuracy and comfort. You can really feel it going from horn to horn. From worst to best:
Pan American Schmidt. This recent project horn (more here) was fun to try at home as it is so smooth and the sound has nice character. The 1-2-3 valve lever position is pretty good, but the thumb valve — that piston valve position just won’t work for me. And T23 has a weird stuffy quality, something still needs fixed there (very heavy oil helps). It was never a serious contender to be used.
Post-war Kruspe. I really wanted to use my Kruspe. It’s medium bell and has such a sweet sound. But the valve positions are all not great. 1-2-3 valve levers are set too low, and the fulcrum point of the thumb valve is kind of off. I go back to patterns in E major such as Pares Scales #99, it’s just not great on this horn. There needs to be no problem going from 2 to T23, but it’s hard to synchronize the motion between those two fingerings. Probably I could get used to it eventually, but I moved on.
Paxman 25A. This one, I love the finger position. Every valve. So comfortable, with great slurs. On the other hand, the horn is huge (with the “American” bell), it really takes some energy. I did the first rehearsal on this, but I’ve got to move on. Even if I used it on both of my solo recordings.
Patterson Geyer. I’m ending up on the Patterson. The valve positions are almost as good as the Paxman, the slurs are still very good, and it’s just easier to play in terms of energy required.
Making new memories
I’m hoping the ASU students I’m playing with will end up with a set of good and useful memories from this Dvorak run. I like to think I’m playing with a similar style to that demonstrated by Bloom, and we’ll see if I can hit the ending better than he did on the concert!
