Music / Mozart’s Horn, Australian Haydn Ensemble. At Wesley Uniting Church, Forrest, September 26. Reviewed by GRAHAM McDONALD. 

The Australian Haydn Ensemble was in its core string quartet mode for this concert, with the addition of horn player Carla Blackwood and violist Nicole Divall. 

This was in addition to the established quartet of AHE musical director and violinist Skye McIntosh, violinist Matthew Greco, violist Karina Schmitz and cellist Daniel Yeardon.

The inclusion of Blackwood, playing a natural horn added a distinctive tonal colouring to the strings. The natural horn has no valves, as used on modern brass instruments, but depends on the insertion of different lengths of coiled brass tubing to change key. In addition, a curious technique of inserting the right hand of the player into the horn is needed to play a chromatic scale, rather than the more limited range of a natural brass instrument such as a bugle.

The program started with a two-movement horn quintet by the wonderfully obscure Dutch/German composer Wilhelm Hauff. This was followed by the first movement of a Mozart String Quintet, K516, and Mozart’s first Horn Quintet, K407, written for a musical family friend, Joseph Leutgeb, around 1782. The scoring for the horn in the final movement is challenging, though Blackwood powered her way through it with great skill.

The second half of the concert featured a Romance for horn and string quartet by Michael Haydn, Joseph’s younger brother and another musical friend of the Mozart family. This uses the same musical theme as the Romanze of Mozart’s third horn concerto and may well have been a musical gift from Mozart. 

The concert concluded with another of the small ensemble arrangements of classical symphonies for which the Haydn Ensemble has become internationally known. 

In this case it was an early 19th century arrangement of Mozart’s Symphony No 41, the Jupiter, made for a string quintet with the addition of Nicole Divall’s second viola. This one did not seem to work as well as some of the AHE’s previous offerings in this genre, but that was more the arrangement itself rather than the performance. 

As we have come to expect from this ensemble, the playing was exemplary. The performers are all aware of what the others are doing, lots of watching and nodding and little smiles. They show a comfort and trust in each other’s abilities, being able to concentrate on the music, not just the dots on the page. 

If they have any problem, it is just that the Wesley Church is too small, again highlighting the lack of an acoustic music venue, for perhaps 300 people, in this city. Maybe one of the political parties might like to promise such a venue in the lead up to the coming election.