Position: 2nd horn

What year did you join the LMP?
In April 1974, the horn section had two Principals then, Ifor James and James Diack.

At what age did you start playing?
14

Apart from the London Mozart Players, what other musical activities are you involved in?
I have enjoyed a busy freelance career in all aspects of the profession for over 40 years, before that I was a staff member of the BBC for two and a half years. You name it and I’ve probably done it! I have some lovely and talented private pupils too. I occasionally offer to go into local schools to do a horn demonstration session, for fun.

What do you love about your instrument and why?
Undoubtedly, hearing the rich, warm, full, heroic tone has got to be the best experience for any horn player to know. Musical instruments vibrate in one’s hands like a live animal and feeling your three and a half meters of French Horn rattle is terrific. Sitting in a horn section of world-class players is a wonderful feeling and ‘going with them’ is a wow factor second to none, i.e. the Battle Scene in Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. I do enjoy the sometimes masochistic, nerve-racking challenges of the extremely quiet, delicate and precision accuracy needed for playing in a small chamber orchestra too, although it can feel very lonely at times!

Which player of your instrument do you most admire and why?
There have been so many brilliant horn players who have emerged over the last 50 years, but head and shoulders over them all is the phenomenal Dennis Brain, who had everything. He was a genius player, a natural communicator, a sensitive artist and musician, an entertainer and a humble human being, in vast quantities. He was here on this earth for only 36 years and left us utterly bereft, at his peak. A tragedy. He was the original Principal Horn and Soloist of the LMP in 1949. Chris Newport (LMP’s Principal Horn) comes a close second!

What is your favourite piece of music and why?
There are so many pieces to choose from, both choral, opera, orchestral, solo works, chamber music, it is an almost impossible question to answer really. From a horn players point of view, the 21 horn players needed for Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony offers great value for money and a splendid opportunity for mass reunions of horn players in the bar! I have had a lot of fun over the years with this piece! I love the big romantic, luscious, 19th/early 20th Century orchestral and operatic repertoire. Wagner’s Ring has it all and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is a must for me. I love Alexander Von Zemlinsky’s The Little Mermaid, another massive tone poem alongside his brother in law Arnold Schoenberg’s Pelleas and Melisande a hugely over-the-top work written just before he threw away the composition rule book! All these pieces have 8 horns in - therefore jobs for the boys (and girls)! Frank Sinatra singing ‘Only the Lonely’ with The Nelson Riddle Orchestra is also pretty hard to beat, for me.

What other types of music do you listen to?
I am the son of a vicar and having been a treble chorister at King’s College Cambridge in the 1950’s, under Boris Ord and Sir David Willcocks in that fabulous chapel acoustic, I adore Renaissance and Tudor church music, Byrd, Tallis, Palestrina, etc as well as the great settings of Wesley, Walmisley, Stanford, Parry, Howells, Darke, etc. My wife and I sing in a very good local amateur choir and I relish all this stuff again, but now as a second bass. I enjoy big bands from the 1950’s, especially Nelson Riddle, Billy May, Gordon Jenkins, Henry Mancini and The Ted Heath Band. Janacek is a favourite at the moment.

How do you spend your spare time, if you have any?
Surviving !  Seriously though, I am the Historian for The British Horn Society and have researched/complied and edited a ‘Who’s Who Of The Horn In The U.K. In The 20th.Century’, which I am hoping to have published. I am a member of my local U3A Victorian History Society, a member of Abbots Langley History Society, I enjoy our village rambling group, I go to a keep fit class to stay alive and my wife and I have a trio, The Breakspear Trio, soprano, horn and piano and we do concerts for local charities. I like buying second-hand books, very much to my wife’s irritation regarding dusting and storage and have fun cooking curries. I am looking forward very much to being a father-in-law next year.