It’s a bugbear of French horn players. While several of the great Romantics wrote beautifully for their instrument – Brahms, Mahler, Wagner – none of them wrote concertos. With one exception: Richard Strauss.
Of the composer’s two horn concertos, the first is the more popular. Strauss was a teenager when he wrote it and the work fizzes with youthful exuberance.
“It’s got energy and naivety,” agrees Samuel Jacobs, the NZSO’s principal horn who is vacating his chair to play the work with Dunedin Symphony Orchestra on Saturday, April 20. “What I think makes it so popular with audiences is that you can sit back and let it wash over you, you don’t have to work too hard to enjoy it.”
Jacobs will have to work hard, though. Strauss’s solo writing is deceptively sophisticated, prompted no doubt by the fact his father was one of Europe’s leading horn players. Added to which, nothing on horn is easy.
“Even the simplest sounding thing can be enough to give [horn players] sleepless nights,” admits Jacobs. “[But] the audience doesn’t need to know it’s hard, and if they do, we’re not doing our job as performers – the goal is to make it sound easy.”
Jacobs first performed the Strauss as a 17-year-old with his London youth orchestra.
“The first time you play a concerto it’s terrifying,” he says. “You don’t enjoy a single minute of it, you just think, ‘I hope I don’t have any memory lapses; I hope my stamina lasts and I don’t have to quit halfway through the last page.’ But the more you do something, the more you learn from it and start to enjoy it and think, ‘Maybe I can do this.’”
If playing Strauss’s concerto didn’t immediately convince Jacobs he could do this, then surely becoming principal horn with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra must have.
The way he describes it, his three years in London were a whirlwind of concerts and soundtrack recording sessions as well as champagne-drinking with Sting. It sounds exhausting.
“If you want to be surrounded by the most amazing musicians and play great music in great halls, then there’s nowhere better in the world,” he says. “But it’s not sustainable. There are people who’ve been in the RPO 35 years and I’m looking at them thinking: how?”
Jacobs already knew Aotearoa. He’d briefly been NZSO principal before taking the RPO job, making Wellington an obvious destination. One thing New Zealand lacks that the UK has in abundance, however, is television game shows. As a student, Jacobs appeared on four of them.
“It’s played four, lost four,” he sighs. “I would do it again because it’s good fun, but there don’t seem to be many in New Zealand, so sadly there’s no opportunity to get my first victory. It’s a failed career.”
Dunedin Symphony Orchestra: Beethoven, Brahms and Strauss, Dunedin Town Hall, April 20.
