Concertino for horn in E minor Op.45

Adagio - Andante con moto - Adagio - Alla Polacca

Although Weber’s favourite wind instrument was the clarinet - or so it seems from the number of solo works he wrote for it - he also had great understanding of the horn. His use of the horn in the Oberon and Der Freischütz introduced a magical new sound into romantic music. There is a new sound in the Concertino too, one that was not taken up again until well into the twentieth century. At the end of the second Adagio, a kind of cadenza presented as a dramatically expressive recitative, the soloist is required to provide his own harmonic accompaniment by humming one note while playing another in the normal way. The other technical problems are less eccentric but still a challenge today - not so much in the increasingly animated variations on the lovely Andante melody that follows the Adagio introduction as in the final Alla Polacca, a characteristically debonair polonaise with a coda of extravagant brilliance. Written originally in Carlsruhe in 1806 and revised in Munich nine years later, the Horn Concertino is the one work of its kind between the last of the Mozart and the first of the Strauss concertos to hold a more than occasional place in the repertoire.