Six Pieces for Horn Violin and Piano by Hans Abrahamsen. Programme Note  My ’6 Pieces for horn violin and piano’ was written in 1984 as a commission from the Danish Radio for a concert where Ligeti’s Horn Trio should receive its Danish premiere played by Danish musicians. My trio is based on my work ’Studies for Piano’. While I wrote these studies I tried to ’conjure up’ instrumental parts inside the piano movement. When I received the commission for a horn trio I turned to six of the studies and deepened them by ’screening them’ so that their partsand moods appeared in a clearer way. Furthermore I changed the order of the movements so a new unity appeared beginning with a steadyly hesitating ’Serenade’ in slow-motion followed by the ’Arabesque’ which hardly gets started before it stops. Then ’Blues’ a melancholy melody and ’Marcia Funebre’ like a fossilized picture with a dramatic threatening outburst ending with a quiet but majestic melody in violin and horn a melody that disappears in the chords of the piano. Before the last movement ’For the Children’ is a large ’Scherzo misterioso’. Hans Abrahamsen

Brahms?s famous Horn Trio op.40 composed in 1865 for the natural horn is a work of considerable significance within the composer?s output. Up until now the work was believed to have a strong emotional connection to the death of his mother three months earlier.However Christopher Hogwood draws on a newly discovered source for this Bärenreiter publication a source that has not been available for any previous edition. We now learn that Brahms wrote at least the trio movement some twelve years earlier in 1853 and that it was originally intended for solo piano. This piano movement is printed in the appendix.This Urtext edition offers notonly the standard instrumentation of violin horn and piano but also the alternative scoring for violoncello or viola instead of horn. The variants found in the violoncello and viola parts are shown as ossias in the score.The introduction (Eng/Ger) describes the compositional process includes information on the performance and publication history of the work and offers comments on performance practice. A critical commentary with facsimile pages of the manuscript rounds off this pioneering edition.Appendix with the 1853 piano version of the trio movementIncludes alternative parts for violoncello and viola

This piece has a broad moderately paced first movement which leads to a sparkling scherzo which in turn gives way to an extremely sparsely textured movement that features the horn and its less frequently used techniques. The whole piece turns on this movement then a couple of crisp arpeggios act as a premature cinematic transition into the big finale the longest and the technically most demanding movement of the piece.