Mozart Horn Concertos

Hornist Ben Goldscheider pairs all four Mozart Horn Concertos with the Münchener Kammerorchester, presented deliberately in reverse order — from the technically demanding Fourth back to the more modestly scaled First — for what he calls the most coherent listening experience from start to finish. As Mark Berry's liner notes trace, these works were written across the 1780s for Mozart's lifelong friend Joseph Leutgeb, a horn player the composer teased mercilessly in the scores themselves (scribbling "pity on Leitgeb, donkey, ox and clown" on one autograph, and littering the Fourth Concerto's cadenza-ready manuscript with colored inks whose exact meaning still puzzles scholars). Despite the mockery, Mozart's writing for Leutgeb grew steadily more ambitious — from the First Concerto's comparatively modest D major scope through the increasingly operatic lyricism of the Third and the grand, Figaro-adjacent dramatic timing of the Fourth. For Goldscheider, the album is also a personal milestone: released just before his 29th birthday, it reflects nearly two decades of living with this music, from his first performances of K. 495 at the Royal Albert Hall and Berlin Philharmonie to a coffee-stained childhood score of the First Concerto. Recorded at Bavaria Musikstudios in Munich, with cadenzas by Andreas Staier, the recording captures both scholarly care and genuine affection for repertoire that shaped the horn concerto as a genre.

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Ben Goldscheider, horn Münchener Kammerorchester Susanne von Gutzeit, concertmaster