Remembering Brain

  Driving overnight to London on September 1, 1957, after playing Tchaikovsky’s death-conscious Symphonie Pathetique at the Edinburgh Festival, Britain’s most gifted hornist, the 36-year-old Dennis Brain, was killed when his Triumph TR2 sports car left the road and struck a tree outside the De Havilland aircaft factory at Hatfield in Hertfordshire.  Tchaikovsky’s last masterpiece, completed just before he died in 1893, had steered him to his fate, or so it was frequently claimed at the time. 

It was the Edinburgh Festival’s first musical tragedy of its sort. Dennis Brain loved fast cars. People speculated on whether, so close to home where he was due to record Richard Strauss’s Second Horn Concerto the following day, he must have fallen asleep at the wheel. 

Memories of Brain returned this week when, driving home across Edinburgh, we suddenly heard the strains of Mozart’s Fourth Horn Concerto emerging from our car radio. Brain was unmistakably the soloist, the softly mellifluous tone of the slow movement and the rollicking verve of the finale being the combined giveaway. 

The exquisitely dovetailed orchestral playing denoted that the recording was the one he made with the youthful Herbert von Karajan (so much sprightlier then than in his maturity) with the same Philharmonia Orchestra. Finally the announcement came from Classic FM. Indeed it was Brain we had heard.    

In Edinburgh in 1957 he had been playing with the Philharmonia, of which he was by now principal horn, during that fateful week in which  Eugene Ormandy conducted the Tchaikovsky symphony  and Otto Klemperer conducted Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, that other great song of destiny.  Also at the Usher Hall, the ever-active hornist had appeared with his own wind ensemble on August 22 in performances of Mozart’s E flat Quintet, K452, and Poulenc’s Sextet, as well as at the Freemasons’ Hall in a morning programme of Beethoven,  Malipiero, Dukas and the now forgotten P. Racine Fricker. 

 He was due to come back to Edinburgh on September 6 to play Strauss’s Second Horn Concerto 

(supposedly after making his recording of it in London) with Ormandy and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.

Was he overworking? At least his perfectly poised recording of the four Mozart horn concertos with Karajan can still be bought and savoured,  and so can that of Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, the horn part of which was specially composed for him.  But he never recorded the Strauss, though an earlier recording of it remains available along with two different  recordings of the Horn Concerto No 1.