June in New Hampshire

Jasper Rees enjoys the Kendall Betts Horn Camp

Horn camp. Yes, I've run through the jokes in my head. ΄Horn΄ is a word rich in opportunities for double entendre. So is ΄camp'. Put them together and what have you got? An annual course for horn players in an idyllic lakeside setting in New Hampshire.

At the tail-end of 2004 I took up the French horn again after a longish lay­off of 22 years. No sooner had I joined the massed horn blow at the British Horn Society's festival than I was setting myself a target of playing a solo at the festival a year later. What persuaded the society to let me flout their strict quality control guidelines I will never know, but the fact that I am writing a book about my quixotic musical journey must have counted in my favour. I duly had the odd lesson to keep me on the straight and narrow, I practised diligently, and in small increments I struggled up the scale of accomplishment from "useless" to "barely tolerable". The festival was some way off on the other side of summer, but it occurred to me that, to be remotely up to snuff, I was going to need some form of intensive coaching; some shock therapy. Then one day on the internet I found a link to something called KBHC.

What caught my eye about Kendall Betts's Horn Camp - apart from the shots of log cabins, rolling hills and tree-lined vistas, apart from the fact that it's open to all ages from high school kids to pensioners, apart from the chance to play in a concert at the end of the week - was the roster of teachers. Among an array  of distinguished,   mostly  American professors were two of my favourite horn players: the great Hermann Baumann, and Lowell Greer, whose recording for Harmonia Mundi of the Brahms trio on a natural horn is the only one you'll ever need.  I booked my passage to Boston.

Thus, in mid-June, I duly get a ride to Camp Ogontz, slap dab in the middle of nowhere three hours from the airport. I arrive halfway through

KBHC's two-week course, which turns out to be perfect timing. New Hampshire in June is prone to erratic weather. In the first week, explain the bedraggled survivors, it rained without cease. For all my time there, the sun had put paid to the heavy dew by mid-morning, leaving it free to lightly toast a campful of hard-blowing horn players for the remainder of the day.

The first thing you do when you pitch up at KBHC is take your horn up to Kendall Betts's cabin. Kendall, who was principal horn of the Minnesota Symphony for many years, is the only horn player I've come across who somehow seems to have missed out on a career in stand-up. He sounds funny, he looks funny, he even plays funny when he dons the false nose and wig of his Teutonic doppelganger. Prof. IM Gestopftmitscheist. More on that later. For now I have to show him what I can do, which after 12 hours' travel is not a whole lot. Kendall asks me what I'm aiming to achieve in the week. I need performance practice, I tell him, given what I've let myself in for. I need to play in one of the concerts at the end of the week. "I'm not sure that's a good idea," he warns. "If you crash and burn..." I'll be scarred for life? I'm prepared to take the risk. "Well if you want to play in the concert you're going to have to impress Hermann." Has a scarier sentence ever been spoken to an amateur horn player?

Impressing Hermann? - Jasper Rees (right) with Hermann Baumann, (left).

The next morning I pitch up for lessons in the adult rookies class, also consisting of Richard, a retired engineer from New Jersey, and Monica, a nun from Massachusetts. Richard can knock out a big sound, Sister Monica is a hard-working novice, and I'm somewhere in between. We make for an odd but contented trio as we traipse from lesson to lesson through the various huts and cabins scattered around the camp. There are so many teachers on the KBHC faculty that you never have a lesson with anyone twice, apart from with Kendall, who sees everyone every day for a session on Kopprasch and long tones. In a dozen lessons you can pick up dozen different warm-up routines, a dozen different ways to trill, a dozen different philosophies of horn playing. You can't use it all. But you are never bored.

The week's schedule also allows for two individual lessons, which is how I find myself one balmy afternoon in the bear-like presence of Lowell Greer. As I thrash through the first movement of K447 he sips Dr. Pepper and wears a look of beatific patience on his mellowly bearded face. We talk - or rather he talks - about the jocularity that went missing from Mozart's concertos in the po-faced 19th century, before embarking on a magnificent improvised cadenza on the subject of the French horn's role in the modem world. "The horn's job is to bring repose," he argues. I can't remember being this entranced by the display of a finely wrought mind since university.  Did I mention that he can play too?

Things kick off early at KBHC. After waking up in the "hotel", where the aduIts are garrisoned in shared rooms (anyone of school or college age sleeps in cloth-walled "Adirondack" cabins), breakfast is early, lunch is early (the food, incidentally, is straight out of the top drawer) and from 1 till 3 the Hermann Baumann masterclass is in residence in the log cabin concert hall.

The first day I just go along to watch Hermann, trim and dapper in his early 70s, strides about at the front in shorts, barking his forceful version of English. A smattering of people sit at the back. each awaiting their turn. My turn turns out to be on the second day. I play the Romanza of K447. I am fortunate that the day before a guy who shall be nameless nervously steered a ten-ton truck right through the very same movement. I merely skid around it on a quad bike, knocking over just a modicum of notes, and Hermann is kind enough to make approving noises at a phrase or two. "Gut," he says. "Now play the first movement." This is the one I really want to play in the concert. I crack into the Allegro and feel the quad bike gradually morphing into a ten-tonne truck. Luckily, before I can do too much damage Hermann stops me and tells me to come back tomorrow.

A daily routine is quickly established. Morning lessons fly by, then there's the Baumann masterclass followed by ensemble practice. Under Kendall's baton, our somewhat shaky octet have a daily crack at Mendelssohn's Nocturne and a couple of Handel arias, which we will play at the two end-of-week concerts. In the two hours' free time, for those not lured by the opportunity for more practice, the lake beckons, or the rapids of the stream that courses through the camp. I take up the option of Lowell's natural horn ensemble, though I have never played a natural horn in my life. We hammer through roistering hunting tunes, while from the front a gently perspiring Lowell conducts and dispenses wit, wisdom and Dr Peppers.

This is the life!

After supper there is a talk or a performance. One night   Prof.  IM Gestopftmitscheist treats us to a recital of uniquely garish hue, all dribbles and cracks and clams. Another the faculty lay on a show with Hermann wrestling majestically with the Gliere concerto for the first time since the stroke that nearly killed him in 1990. Opera night ends with the whole  room  unsheathing  their instruments to perform a 40-horn rendition of the luminous opening of Das Rheingold. By the next morning the goose bumps have just about gone down.   

But for me the day is built around the visit to Hermann. He is alternately soft cop and hard cop. When I plav badly, which is most of the time, he yanks open the bonnet and digs around inside trying to work out what's wrong with the engine. He asks for more dynamics, more legato, more crescendi, more volume. One passage, humiliatingly, he makes me sing over and over again. After three visits to his laboratory, Hermann is just about prepared to let me sneak under the wire. However, he won't let me inflict the first movement on the rest of the camp. I must play safe and stick to the slow second.

At supper before the concert I feel like a condemned man. This is mv first time in front of an audience. When the concert starts with a student soaring through Strauss 1, it becomes apparent that the level of competence is alarmingly high. Even Sister Monica, newer to this game than me, romps through her folksy American dirge without a hiccup. When my turn comes I walk up front and boldly, assertively, incontrovertibly split the first note of the Romanza, a bog-standard B flat. The onrush of nerves is not unexpected, but still wholly new. Gradually the easiest movement of the easiest Mozart horn concerto comes apart in mv hands. Every entry is greeted by a distressing inaccuracy. Buried somewhere deep beneath the rubble is the occasional felicity. I think the rall may have gone well. I enter the home straight somewhat regrouped and then at the end, in the interests of symmetry, 1 split B flat in the final bar too. The applause is generous, but unmerited. Afterwards the great Hermann Baumann comes up to this traumatised student and, flying in the face of all the evidence, says, "You see! You can do it! And next time it will be better!"

When I re-entered the real world of work and responsibility, a friend asked me to sum up my experience of horn camp in one word. One word did run through my mind throughout the week as groups of college students, all brandishing the magical instrument we know as the French horn, trooped in and out of log cabins set deep in wooded nooks, and that word was Hogwarts. But adults are allowed into this school for wizardry too. It seems just too good to be true, which is why my answer was "Paradise".

I Found My Horn by Jasper Rees will be published by Orion in July, 2007.  It can be ordered in advance at Amazon.co.uk.