John EricsonA pair of tapes I was anxious to hear as part of an ongoing cassette tape conversion project were the tapes of my junior and recitals. These are interesting from a few different angles.
One angle is that of what to put on a junior or senior recital—what and how much music? I have this conversation with many students. In my own case both were full hour recitals but not overly long.
The junior recital had one additional criteria for me, I could hardly play above the staff due to a recent embouchure change. On it I performed Mozart: Concerto No. 3 (complete—a complete concerto is a great project), Faith: Movements for horn and piano, and a “suite” of three French works–Francaix: Canon in Octave, Clerisse: Chant sans Paroles, and Piantoni: Air de Chasse. I also performed a work with the faculty brass quintet, the Horowitz Music Hall Suite (due to a new horn TA leaving Emporia after one week I became the hornist in the quintet that year, which was a great experience at the time).
For the junior recital for my students I normally suggest something similar. It does not need to be long or difficult, it just needs to be good music and interesting to you, and perhaps including a chamber group you perform in.
I should note at this point that there is an alternate plan that some teachers seem to really favor. I refer to it loosely as the “shock therapy” recital. Assign the student to do some really hard music, maybe Strauss 2 and the Adagio and Allegro and Gliere! Their point is to see if the student will sink or swim. I can see the point, but I am not in this group of teachers anyway. Shorter and not too hard is I think the better tactic as part of the process of learning the horn.
My senior recital was a bit longer. On this I usually suggest it have some relationship to works you plan to use for college auditions, but I personally did not follow this rule. On it I played the Corelli Suite in F, the Micheal Haydn Concertino, Schubert Auf Dem Strom (with a great tenor who happened to be named John Lennon), Schmid Im tiefsten Walde (which I ultimately recorded on my Canto CD — video below), and the Jan Bach Four Two Bit Contraptions for horn and flute. Most of them I had found myself by listening to records in the library.
In terms of how I played on the recitals, well, the tapes confirm that I did actually miss notes in every single movement. Mostly just a couple notes, but nothing is perfect in either recital. The Schmid is perhaps the best, only one big chip and actually a whole lot like my later recording.
I had a good sound back then. I had not listened to these tapes in at least 15 years. It is really interesting to rate as I have heard so many prospective students audition that were frankly better than I was at the same age. It gets at that difficult question of who makes it and how? In my own case I think it was mostly hard work with good underlying talent but a lot of problems to work out that took me years and years to do.