Gregory Miller - Solos for the Horn Player - The Mason Jones Book (2006)

Mason Jones was one of the foremost American horn players of the mid twentieth century, and his 1962 collection Solos for the Horn Player with Piano Accompaniment has been a standard for generations of young hornists. Several of the more contemporary selections were written for horn and piano, but the majority are arrangements made from Baroque vocal solos, Classical chamber music, and Romantic orchestral music. Gregory Miller, a student of a student of Jones, has recorded the entire collection as a recital spanning more than 300 years of music, but he must also have especially had in mind the countless horn players who spent hours in practice rooms becoming intimately familiar with these pieces. Miller plays with a full and robust tone, and his phrasing is nuanced and sensitive. The Romantic pieces, such as Saint-Saëns' Romance and Glazunov's Reveries, are especially satisfying, perhaps because they were written for the instrument rather than being transcriptions and they give the horn the opportunity to soar. In some of the Baroque pieces, Miller's attacks are uncharacteristically unclean, a problem that occurs less frequently in the later repertoire. Ernest Barretta provides strong piano accompaniment. The collection would be of interest to horn players and fans of solo brass music.