It’s a tricky thing with the horn. In the middle register the warm tone melts with the rest of the orchestra, in the high register it likes to squeak. One might think that he was not born to play a solo instrument. But musicians like Felix Klieser quickly sweep such prejudices aside. His horn has a shimmering sound that differentiates itself from the tutti at the right time in order to go its own imaginative path. Or it fits organically into the musical fabric that the Festival Strings Lucerne im Prince Regent Theater under Daniel Dodds to offer him.
You could already get to know them in the third orchestral suite of old dances put together by Ottorino Respighi as a committed, homogeneously acting ensemble – you breathe together. Good prerequisites for seconding Felix Klieser in Mozart’s Second Horn Concerto (KV 417), whereby the competition between solo and orchestra is transformed into friendly music-making in the group, with sometimes one and sometimes the other having the floor. In this way, Klieser can unfold his phrasing intelligence over moving orchestral chords, especially in the melancholic subordinate theme. The obligatory hunting music ends the concert with a lively parlando. Needless to say, Klieser was born without arms and therefore operates the instrument’s valves with his toes. The level of the young artist speaks for itself.
Effortlessness, that sprezzatura that has always been the hallmark of the virtuoso, is added to the culture of sound and sophistication. Klieser leads through the cadenza of the first movement in Mozart’s Fourth Horn Concerto (KV 495), unfolds the lyricism in the romance and rushes through the finale. A blaring Rossini encore (“Le rendez-vous de chasse”) sets the exclamation point under the self-confident virtuoso statement. It’s not that the Lucerne Chamber Orchestra didn’t play Mozart’s Symphony No. 29 very beautifully, slender and witty, but the flashing horn fanfare would have been the more effective conclusion.