Mozart: Horn Concertos Nos. 1-4 (CD review)

Jacek Muzyk, horn; Agnieszka Duezmal, Amadeus Chamber Orchestra of Polish Radio. Naxos 8.570419.

The first thing I noticed when I picked up this disc was that it included only the four Mozart Horn Concertos and nothing else. This amounts to only a little over fifty minutes of music, while most competing labels include another concerto or two. I also thought, well, if you could buy the Naxos disc for around five bucks, it would still be worth the money, and then I remembered that "budget-priced" Naxos discs are now retailing at about nine or ten dollars, nearly the cost of most remastered mid-price material. So, the album is not the bargain it might have been a few years ago.

The performances are pleasant enough, if not extraordinary in any way. I mean, how can you knock a musician whose name is Muzyk, anyway? He plays a good horn, although he's also rather foursquare in his interpretations. Occasionally, I felt that the slow sections might have been a little too languid, but they are brief interludes, and things pick up in the outer movements.

The Naxos sound for Muzyk and the Amadeus Chamber Orchestra of Polish Radio is fairly close, yet with plenty of resonant bloom. Although the engineers capture the horn in the center position, it is a tad more recessed than usual, and the orchestral spread seems to favor the left side of the sound stage a tad too much.

Although this disc makes a safe bet, a relatively new digital recording, do note that one might obtain greater value with several of the mid-priced reissues of recordings that have stood the test of time, things like Dennis Brain with Herbert von Karajan (EMI, mono), Alan Civil with Rudolf Kempe (EMI), Lowell Greer with Nicholas McGegan (Harmonia Mundi), or Barry Tuckwell with Neville Marriner (EMI). It's an open field.

JJP