Your Favourite Musical Instrument & works that demonstrate your choice?

[Beef Oven!]

Since retiring a few years ago, I've been able to listen to so much more music and many of my perceptions and preferences have changed, including the musical instruments that float my boat.

Just 7 or so years ago I would have identified the electric guitar or the drums as my favourite instrument, but I quickly developed a liking for woodwind. I especially liked the oboe and I always had a place in my heart for the clarinet. However, having listened to tons of Vivaldi, I find the bassoon is my clear woodwind favourite, these days.

But a strange thing has happened this year. I suspect as a result of listening to a bit more Mozart than usual and an underlying love of Wagner and Bruckner, the brass section has come from behind and taken poll position.

So now, my favourite musical instrument is the French horn.

I absolutely love this instrument in Britten's Serenade, especially the Dennis Brain later performance (). But the clincher for me is Mozart's Horn Concerto No.4, with Barry Tuckwell (much better recording than Brain/Karajan - makes a difference).

I do not understand the technical side of this instrument or music in general to explicate my choice, but I just love the sound.

Don Juan, Siegfried, Tchaik 5, anyone?

There are quite a few contemporary compositions and musicians that/who make the case for this instrument.

P.S. Although I enjoy solo piano music very much indeed, I'm not big on piano concertos and much prefer violin concertos (Schoenberg's pc being one of a few exceptions).

[Richard Barrett]

There are quite a few contemporary compositions and musicians that/who make the case for this instrument.

As it happens, a new duo for horn and percussion by myself was premiered this very evening, by Christine Chapman and Dirk Rothbrust (of the Musikfabrik ensemble), and I'm sitting here in my hotel room feeling really quite pleased about how it went. (Actually there aren't that many pieces which take the instrument into new areas, the "Appel Interstellaire" from Messiaen's Des canyons aux étoiles being one.) i don't think I really have a "favourite instrument" though.

[kernelbogey]

Not my favourite instrument, but just to support the above posts, Brahms's trio for Horn, Violin and Piano is up there in the firmament with, oh, Mozart things and Schubert things....

The sublime adagio was composed, I believe, to express his grief over the death of his mother. Play it and weep at the Horn's soaring lines....

[kernelbogey]

Since retiring a few years ago

Oh Beefy, I can't beleive it. You look so young in your picture.

[antongould]

Piano for me beefers ........ Beethoven sonatas .......

[Petrushka]

It would have to be the French horn in my case, too - it came into my head as soon as I saw the question. Richard Strauss understood the instrument better than most and to hear the full horn section in full cry in Don Juan, Ein Heldenleben and Eine Alpensinfonie is incredibly thrilling. Mahler, too, in the intro to the 3rd Symphony and the end of the 1st.

Love the horns in the trio of the Bruckner 6 scherzo, ditto the Beethoven Eroica, the start of Bruckner 4 and Schubert 9 and then the wonderful solo horn in Mahler 5 plus the epilogue to Heldenleben.

Wonderful instrument.

[MrGongGong]

[BBMmk2]

Piano for me beefers ........ Beethoven sonatas .......

I was going to say the same for me, AG!

[Nick Armstrong]

Horn - Strauss second concerto
Clarinet - Rachmaninov second symphony slow movement
Piano - too many to choose....!

[kernelbogey]

It would have to be the French horn in my case, too - it came into my head as soon as I saw the question. Richard Strauss understood the instrument better than most and to hear the full horn section in full cry in Don Juan, Ein Heldenleben and Eine Alpensinfonie is incredibly thrilling. Mahler, too, in the intro to the 3rd Symphony and the end of the 1st.

Love the horns in the trio of the Bruckner 6 scherzo, ditto the Beethoven Eroica, the start of Bruckner 4 and Schubert 9 and then the wonderful solo horn in Mahler 5 plus the epilogue to Heldenleben.

Wonderful instrument.

Sitting behind the orchestra [which?] in King's College chapel circa 1966, very close to the horns, in the cadenza of Brahms 3 iv*, we could hear nothing but the horns!

(*I think I've got the right Brahms symphony here: the experience was unforgettable, though.

I agree about that horn theme in Strauss's Don Juan: for me it has always been like an icon, a symbol, of Romanticism.

[kernelbogey]

It has to be the clarinet..

(I have a b flat instrument under the stairs. I took it up for a couple of years more than 30 years ago, then laid it aside.)

Examples:
Obviously the Mozart Concerto and Quintet
Brahms Quintet
Weber: two concertos IIRC and another orchestral piece
Crusell passim
Schubert Shepherd on the Rock
Quattuor pour le Fin du Temps passim
Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue - (especially accompanied by the superb photography of Manhattan in the opening seqence of Woody Allen's eponyous movie)
Many solos in Bruckner - especially when the engineer has not potted it up so it sounds dwarfed as he intended

I rest my case.

[richardfinegold]

One of my earliest “aha” moments in Classical Music was the Horn into in Waltz Of the Flowers from the Nutcracker. OP mentioned II from Tchaikovsky 5, another formative bit, and the use of the horns in I from Brahms PC2 as well.
Don’t know if I have favorite instrument...

[vinteuil]

It has to be the clarinet /.../ I rest my case.

... clarinets are nice, granted. But not much written for them before Mozart...

I like the sound of -

the cornett
the chalumeau
the bassoon
the oboe
the french horn, yes
the cello
the viola
the plucked string : yer harpsichord, yer lutes

sometimes I like to hear the cimbalom, the shakuhachi and the sitar and the shehnai, but that may be orientalism.

.

[Richard Tarleton]

Many of my favourite horn moments already above....I mentioned one a few days ago on the recent concerts thread, the entry of the horns after the Wagner tubas in the coda of the adagio of Bruckner 7.....Prelude to Das Rheingold.....

Cello - Bach, Dvorak, Don Quixote, Act 4 Scene 1 of Don Carlo.....

the plucked string : yer harpsichord, yer lutes

If I had my time over again, and knowing what I know now, I'd learn the lute, rather than the guitar - all of them, from the Renaissance to the baroque. Here's Robert Barto playing Weiss's Tombeau sur la mort de M. Cajetan Baron d'Hartig....

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I suppose it has to be the French horn for me too, but only the Vienna Philharmonic model.