Recordings

...Fortunately for the history of the horn, Stich and his companions escaped...

...Martin-in-the-Fields conducted by Neville Marriner (Angel SZ-37781...

...Upon his return to Paris in 1789 Punto discovered he had no job, for the French Revolution had forced his patron to flee the country...

...Unable to find a position to suit him and not the sort to remain too long in any one place anyway, Punto embarked on the then novel and financially risky career of an itinerant soloist, touring Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain, England, and France...

...5, 6, 10, and 11, all written in the period 1795-1801) have recently been recorded by Barry Tuckwell with the Academy of St...

...DERRICK HENRYge...

...Four of these (Nos...

...Even so, he had achieved nothing approaching the renown of Punto...

...Joseph Frohlich, who knew Punto and was evidently himself a horn player, summarized Punto's accomplishment as well as any of his contemporaries: "Punto was remarkable for the purity of his interpretation and the delicacy of his taste no less than for his dynamic control, variety of tone-color, and amazing articulation...

...There was a secondary advantage as well: placing the hand in the bell damped the upper overtones, thus imparting that veiled, dark quality so cherished today...

...Some day it would be nice to hear these concertos played on a natural (i.e...

...And so around 1760 Stich went first to Prague to study with Joseph Matiegka, then to Johann Schindelarz at Munich, and finally to Dresden, where he perfected his high register with Karl Haudek (himself a pupil of Schindelarz) and learned hand-stopping under the major developer and very possibly the actual inventor of that technique, Anton Joseph Hampel...

...the fast movements are full of an engagingly quirky wit, and of course present ample opportunities for virtuosic display...

...These virtues are enhanced by outstandingly vivid sound from EMI/Angel...

...The tale of Stich's transformation to Punto serves as the focal point of a remarkably colorful life, a life which, apart from its innate fascination, dramatically delineates the changing relationship of the musician to society in the late eighteenth century...

...When the pair played Beethoven's sonata in Pest the music critic queried: "Who is this Beethover [sic...

...By the time Stich returned home in 1763 he was a finished artist...

...With unsuspected generosity, he pours the gold of his tones out of the bell of his magical horn, and the gold, now in the forms of coins, flows back into the pockets of the consummate artist...

...Hand-stopping allowed the horn player, up to then dependent solely on the notes obtainable through the harmonic series, to produce tones outside this series and thereby achieve a complete chromatic scale through the first three octaves of his range...

...At that same Vienna concert his proficiency on the brass instrument, according to the prestigious Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, "rightly astonished everyone...

...The performances are highly accomplished...

...Among the works played at that concert was Beethoven's Horn Sonata, written in great haste earlier that year as a vehicle for Punto and the pianist/ composer...

...An adagio blown by him . . . is the ultimate of the art...

...This output includes an attractive Quartet in F for horn and strings, Opus 2, No...

...When Thun learned of the plot, he became understandably furious, and ordered his soldiers to pursue the upstart musicians, taking pains to capture Stich alive-or, at the very least, to knock out his front teeth so that he would never be able to play again...

...Again his playing elicited reactions of amazement...

...He lasted only about a year there, resigning in a huff when the Elector refused to appoint him concertmaster...

...DERRICK HENRY...

...Even the normally acerbic Mozart, after hearing him play in Paris in 1778, exclaimed in a letter: "Punto blast magnifique...

...Even difficulties he solves with indescribable ease...

...Beethoven, incidentally, was then at the height of his performing career...

...Here he finally achieved his ambition of concertmaster, and moreover one with an assurance of a life pension and frequent leave to travel, for Count d'Artois, later to become Charles X. Punto took his first leave around 1784, touring the Rhineland...

...Now the most famous horn player in the world, in 1801 Punto returned to his homeland after an absence of thirty-three years...

...valve-less) horn, where one could get a truer picture of the music's actual difficulty (and Punto's own executant skill), and more importantly hear the crucial timbral differences between open and stopped notes (an out-of-print Telefunken recording of Beethoven's Horn Sonata with Hermann Baumann is revelatory in this regard...

...When Punto died two years later, he was a national hero...

...The most distinctive movement included on this new disc is the finale of No...

...The following year Punto left for Paris, then the European center of instrumental music...

...He did not remain there long...

...Here then is Punto's story...

...Punto wanted the security and prestige of a concertmaster, fancying himself as good a violinist as he was a hornist...

...That of Daniel Schubart (1784), a well-known German poet and musician, was typical: "unquestionably the world's best Waldhorn-ist...

...According to the hom authority Horace Fitzpatrick, whose admirable study The Horn & Horn Playing and the Austro-Bohemian Tradition from 1680 to 1830 (Oxford, 1970) provides fascinating accounts of these figures and their accomplishments, Punto "was without question the finest player of the eighteenth-century Austrian school . . . the first horn soloist in the modern sense capable of absolute fluency in all registers of the instrument's compass...

...His first concert in Prague produced ecstatic acclaim...

...1, which has received a number bf recordings, and some fourteen concertos, of which only six survive complete...

...In 1766, at the age of twenty, Stich decided he had had enough...

...He was born in Tetshen, Bohemia, into a family of serfs under service to Count Joseph Johann von Thun...

...He . . . has studied the range of the horn as no other...

...In 1795 he was appointed violinist/conductor of the Theatre des Varietes Amusantes...

...and together with four other similarly dissatisfied Thun orchestra musicians, he planned to defect across the Bohemian border into Germany, part of the Holy Roman Empire...

...At an early age Stich learned the principles of music and, while still a child, received instruction on the violin and horn...

...Mozart set to work on a Sinfonia concertante for winds (believed to be that now known as K. 297b), conceiving the challenging horn part for Punto's extraordinary skill...

...Of course Punto is very well known...

...Wherever he went, he received extravagant praise...

...He therefore made sure that his prodigy, barely a teenager, learned from the best horn players in the world...

...Though no sane person would rank Punto's music alongside that of Mozart and Beethoven, the music is effervescent, tuneful, utterly charming...

...Others had a different opinion...

...For the most part, Punto's music is formally straightforward and brilliantly idiomatic, music which revels in its sheer technical audacity...

...While we are, alas, today unable to hear Punto's artistry for ourselves, a glimpse of his talent may be gleaned from attentive listening to the horn music Mozart wrote for him in his Sinfonia concertante and Beethoven.in his Horn Sonata: music requiring devilish arpeggios, rapid scales, and, in the Beethoven work, consummate control of hand stopping...

...As the remark indieates, Punto was by now a man of some means...

...A genuine connoisseur of music, Count von Thun recognized a good thing when he heard it...

...Nicolas in Prague, and his grave was adorned with a monument...

...Punto's horn-playing was another matter...

...In the slow movements the soloist is given lovely lyric phrases to display his beauty of tone...

...Most of his music some of it freely adapted from other sources was, not surprisingly, written for his own use...

...He could produce two notes simultaneously, and even full chords [achieved by blowing one note and humming another, thus obtaining two additional notes, one below and one above the generators], and his tone generally had a quality of silvery brightness that was foreign to any of his predecessors...

...Few present-day horn players could cope with Punto's demands with the aplomb and sensitivity of Tuckwell, and few ensembles could supply an accompaniment with the spirit and refinement of the Academy under Marriner...

...But he was also a proud, volatile youth well aware of his talent and, after having enjoyed several years of freedom, not enthused by a prospective life of servitude...

...Soon he was playing in the count's orchestra...

...But it is perhaps just as well that Punto's conducting career was so brief...

...Punto was himself a composer...

...It was the name, though not the given one, of the greatest horn player of his time, Jan Vaclav (or Johann Wenzel) Stich (1748-1803...

...Indeed, as Tuckwell observes in his informative liner notes, "the technical demands on the soloist are far greater than in the concertos of Mozart" [written for another outstanding hornist, Ignaz Leutgeb...

...By 1768 he had found employment as principal horn in the court band of the Prince of Hechingen...

...According to the celebrated lexicographer and musician Ernst Gerber, when Punto directed and played violin in Vienna in 1800 "they wished, for the sake of his honor, that he had not...

...In 1781, evidently wearied of constant traveling, Punto entered the service of the Prince Archbishop of Wurzburg...

...A year later he moved to Mainz for a similar post with the Electoral Court Orchestra...

...For now, we have a stunning reminder of a pathblazing virtuoso from a bygone age...

...His name is not known in musical circles...

...Eulogized in the newspapers, he was accorded a magnificent funeral Mass before more than four thousand people at the Church of St...

...When he revisited England in 1777, his reputation had grown so great that the horn players of King George Ill's private band were placed under his tutelage...

...11, a minuet with four variations, each of increasing difficulty...

...in 1787 he made further excursions, to Germany and England...

...Punto nonetheless remained in Paris, now as Citoyen Punto...

...For his own protection, Stich immediately Italianized his name to Giovanni Punto...

...Like nearly every post Punto held, this one was short-lived...

...This sonata proved so successful, that again according to AMI, "despite the new Theatre Ordinance, which forbids loud applause and encores, the two virtuosi were compelled by loud clapping to start the piece from the beginning and play it through again...