Have you ever wondered what the result might have been had Dennis Brain met Beethoven? Just think what music such a meeting might have brought forth! I get the impression that Bob Ashworth had been contemplating the outcome of a meeting between J S Bach and the great French horn virtuoso Louis-François Dauprat when he made this arrangement of the famous Air from Bach's third Orchestral Suite.
In his great Méthode Dauprat explains that players of the natural horn should practice solos using crooks other than the one specified by the composer in order to obtain variety of timbre and different effects with stopped notes. In this homage to Dauprat, Bob Ashworth has given us just one piano part - in the key of D - but six versions of the horn part, so that aspiring hand horn players can practice it on different crooks.
It works well on the G crook, Bob's first choice, but for my money, his version for horn in D seems remarkably idiomatic. If hand horn is not you thing, then the various versions make excellent transposition practice, especially the one in F sharp, but if transposition is not your thing (Can I ask "Why not?") it also appears in F. As usual with edition db, score and parts are excellently presented.
John Humphries, The Horn Player, BHS, Vol.3, No.1, April 2006
