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The British horn player Dennis Brain (1921–1957) is commonly described by such statements as “the greatest horn player of the 20th Century,” “a genius,” and “a legend.” He was both a prodigy and popularizer, famously performing a concerto on a garden hose in perfect pitch. On his usual concert instrument his tone was of unsurpassed beauty and clarity, complemented by a flawless technique. The recordings he made with Herbert von Karajan of Mozart’s horn concerti are considered the definitive interpretations. Brain enlisted in the English armed forces during World War II for seven years, joining the National Symphony Orchestra in wartime in 1942. After the war he filled the principal horn positions in both the Philharmonia and Royal Philharmonic Orchestras. He later formed his own wind quintet and began conducting. Composers including Benjamin Britten and Paul Hindemith lined up to write music for him. Even fifty years after his tragic death at the age of 36 in an auto accident in 1957, Peter Maxwell Davies was commissioned to write a piece in his honor. Stephen Gamble and William Lynch have conducted numerous interviews with family, friends, and colleagues and uncovered information in the BBC archives and other lesser known sources about recordings that were previously unknown. This volume describes Brain’s life and analyzes in depth his musical career. Its appendices of information on performances will appeal to music historians, and its details on Brain’s instruments and equipment will be useful to horn players. “A pleasure to read: serious but personable, unaffected, unpretentious—conversational in tone. The character of the prose can be said to reflect the character of the book’s subject. Eminently satisfying.”—Robert Marshall, author of Dennis Brain on Record

This is the latest in the Peter Moores Opera in English series, with Cheryl Barker giving a moving and beautifully sung performance as the adorable and tragic Katya, racked with guilt and tormented by emotional repression, surely Janacek's greatest female creation (and I haven't forgotten Jenufa). Robert Brubaker is in excellent voice as her lover, the hapless Boris. Jane Henschel is the hellish mother- in-law Kabanicha (perhaps a little too kindly at times).

\"It is difficult to say anything of [Dennis Brain]'s performance,\" went a typical concert review, \"except that he was an alchemist, turning copper into gold. Anyone who plays the horn at all is to be honoured, but when a phenomenon like Brain appears, whose artistic and technical capacities seem limitless, one can only write (like Haydn) Laus Deo.\" His Midas touch extended as far as the Himalayas in 1953, where James Morris was covering the British ascent of Everest for the Times. \"Marching through Sherpa country,\" Morris recorded, \"it did not in the least surprise me listening on the radio one day to hear Dennis Brain playing a Mozart horn concerto, to find a whole posse of film men bursting through the tent flap to hear him, too.\" The day the news reached London that Everest had been conquered, Brain was playing at the coronation. \"I felt shock like everybody else,\" he says. \"I'm sure there were banner headlines in the daily papers about Dennis Brain dying. I don't think that's ever happened before or since with a classical musician.

In September it will be 50 years since the horn-player Dennis Brain was killed in a car crash at the age of 36. But his recordings continue to keep his name before a public that never knew him, and his artistry and virtuosity are still unsurpassed. From 1946 to 1957 he worked with both the Philharmonia and the RPO and recorded the four Mozart concertos with the Philharmonia and Karajan in November 1953. Despite the age of the recordings, which have been restored by Mark Obert-Thorn,I give them five stars not only because of Brain's incomparable playing but also because the orchestral contribution under Karajan is so fine and stylish - not 'period' stylish, of course, but Mozart stylish. Wit, romance and subtle phrasing abound in Brain's performance of all four concertos. All three of these qualities can be heard in No. 2 (K.417), the first of the three in the key of E flat major. But it is in K.447 and K.495 that one hears the perfect combination of Mozart, Brain and Karajan. The disc is completed by the quintet (also in E flat) for piano and winds (K.452) in which the pianist Walter Gieseking joined the Dennis Brain Wind Ensemble (himself; Sidney Sutcliffe, oboe; Bernard Walton, clarinet; and Cecil James, bassoon - what a line-up!) This too is special.

The headline over your tribute to Humphrey Lyttelton (News Review, April 27) was \"The...

For John Eliot Gardiner, he used the phrase \"extra-ordinary arrogance,\" and Leonard Bernstein: \"America at its most flesh- crawling!\" On a happier note, I was glad to read an article in the BBC music magazine Hindsight extolling the horn playing ability of Dennis Brain. He was the third generation of a horn-playing dynasty, as his grandfather A E Brain was a founding member of the London Symphony Orchestra. His father Aubrey was the leading player of the inter-war years. Dennis himself led the horn sections of both the Royal Philharmonic and the Philharmonia at the time of his tragic, fatal car crash in 1957.

Perhaps he should take lessons on a brass instrument.

When people laugh in the concert hall or the opera house, the reason is almost never the music itself but some combination of words, props or stage direction. A good title like ''Pathetique'' or ''Moonlight'' helps. If Beethoven's Opus 129 did not bear the title ''Rage Over a Lost Penny,'' it would be heard as just another lively rondo. Haydn's ''Farewell'' Symphony, in which the players get up and leave one by one, loses much of its point if not seen in concert. In opera, of course, eyes and ears legitimately and inevitably function as partners. Pressed for an example of operatic wit in which the music perfectly supports and guides the humor, I might nominate the ''stupefaction'' ensemble (''Fredda ed immobile'') that ends Act I of ''The Barber of Seville.'' As the stunned Dr. Bartolo stands ''cold and motionless as a statue,'' Rossini's music sustains its clocklike rhythmic momentum though seeming to stand still. Instead of musical wit, what we enjoy most often are broader-bladed substitutes: ebullience (the opening movements of Mendelssohn's Octet or Poulenc's Sextet), rakishness (Milhaud's ''Boeuf sur le Toit''), rib-poking (Gilbert and Sullivan's allusions to Verdi, Bellini and Donizetti), nature-imitation (Strauss' evocations of sheep in ''Don Quixote'') and so forth. Even brutal satire and parody are uncommon, though Mozart's ''Musical Joke'' and Satie's mockery of endless Beethoven cadences and wistful Chopin melodies come as close to the mark as any. Musical parody, in the hands of a master, can be not only trenchant humor but good music criticism. Prokofiev's ''Classical Symphony,'' now relegated to pop-concert status, still fares well on both counts. An episode in Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra is generally and plausibly assumed to be his skewering of Shostakovich.

Each disc is devoted to one of the great instrumentalists of the 20th Century. In the first, Italian pianist Arturo Benedetti Michel- angeli plays Grieg and Debussy, while in the second English horn player Dennis Brain is heard in recitals of music by Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart and others from the last year of his tragically short life. The Debussy Preludes from 1982 are played with great subtlety, while the Grieg Concerto from 1959 is simply staggering and [Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli] is well matched by the New Philharm-onia Orchestra under the much-underrated Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos, who really deserves his share of the ovation that greets this remarkable performance.