At the tender age of nine, Felix Klieser dreamed of being able to play Mozart’s horn concertos. Today, 18 years later, that dream has finally come true and Felix Klieser now performs on the world’s foremost concert stages, playing the very works which are part of any horn player’s core repertoire. Yet he took his time before recording all four of Mozart’s horn concertos: only after releasing three successful albums and winning an ECHO Klassik award and the Leonard Bernstein Award did he go to Salzburg, in September 2018, to record them with the famous Camerata Salzburg ensemble.

Johannes Brahms’s Horn Trio Op. 40 is without a doubt the best-known work for this formation and also one of the best-known chamber music pieces ever written for horn. Brahms succeeds like virtually no other composer in utilising the tone colours of this instrument. His trio has entrenched this formation in the stock repertoire of any horn player. It is therefore the centrepiece of this release. But what other works were written for horn trio, and was Brahms the first composer to write for this combination of instruments? What Felix Klieser and his friends have found is a repertoire spanning some 100 years, from Frédéric Duvernoy, who wrote his two trios at the start of the 19th century and was still under the influence of Viennese Classicism, to trios by Charles Koechlin (1867-1950) and Robert Kahn, written in the 20th century but still profoundly Romantic in their expression. That being said, Charles Koechlin, Frédéric Duvernoy and Robert Kahn chart intriguing musical terrain, presenting a variety of influences, forms and aspects of interplay between the three instruments. Each of Koechlin’s Quatre petites pièces Op. 32, written by Charles Koechlin between 1896 and 1906, has a distinctive underlying character. The limited compositional œuvre of Frédéric Duvernoy (1765-1838) immediately suggests that the Frenchman, who worked as a horn player at the Paris Opera and as a soloist , wrote music for his own use, notably horn concertos and works for horn and piano, but also three trios for violin, horn and piano, which were written as Trois trios concertants some time after 1820. These pieces are virtuosic, classically elegant and song-like. Serenade op. 73 by Robert Kahn (1865-1951), published in 1923, was clearly inspired by Schumann and even more so by Brahms.