Horn player Felix Klieser loves snow and the freezing cold, even if he doesn’t get much of it at home in Hanover. Winter has been his favorite season ever since he was a child – and not just for climatic reasons: “I’m still an absolute Christmas fan today and can’t think of anything better than coming back into a warm house after a walk in the snow and slowly thawing out with a cup of hot chocolate. Little lights, tins of cookies, a visit to the Christmas market – this time of year is definitely my highlight,” enthuses the horn player.

A soloist’s career path can often be a lonely one, especially for an exceptional instrumental soloist like Felix Klieser. It is then all the more inspiring when over the course of many years playing together, there is the opportunity to build and nurture close artistic and personal contacts with other musicians. Felix Klieser’s concerts with the Prague-based Zemlinsky Quartet therefore are understandably among his annual favourites, as they present an opportunity for the five musicians to come together and to show that many years of music-making together has forged them into much more than just another artistic ensemble. “I have played so much and so often with the Zemlinsky Quartet, and so we wanted to record a programme of music together,” he explains. What could be more suitable for such a project than Mozart and Haydn?

“The Horn Quintet is a real favourite of mine, in fact it may be the piece I like to play most,” is the hornist’s reaction to Mozart’s chamber works for the instrument. He has amply proved that he is very fond indeed of Mozart, having already recorded the Horn Concertos of Wolfgang Amadeus. Now comes the Quintet. “It is such great fun to play this music. It’s like being a child in a sweet shop who is told: ‘you’re allowed to pick up anything and you can eat as much as you like.’ You go tumbling from one mood into another, interchanging between unbounded jubilation and deepest despair in the space of two bars; you really have to be on your toes – it’s intensive stuff.”

Felix Klieser, on his new album Beyond Words, focuses on the language of music, the stories that it tells – all without any words at all. He places the emphasis on the images that arise before our mind’s eye when listening to the music, on the emotions triggered by the music. For Beyond Words the hornist has chosen various arias by Bach, Vivaldi, Handel and Gluck, each of which describes the various, self-contained musical worlds they encompass in a very individual manner.

For many listeners, the repertoire will probably conjure up memories, since many people will be very familiar with Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus and Ombra mai fù or Bach’s Bereite dich Zion and Wohl mir, dass ich Jesum habe. On this album, they will hear them in a very different form: the choice of Baroque arias and chorales by the master composers Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonio Vivaldi and George Frideric Handel gives the horn the role of the human voice, allowing it to trace the melodic flow and imitate the sound of the voice. Klieser is accompanied by the CHAARTS Chamber Artists ensemble, founded in 2010 in Zurich, Swizzerland. The musicians are able, in harmony with Klieser’s soft timbre, to breath new life into the Baroque works with their modern instruments.

What is really important for his album however is not virtuosity, but tonal expression, according to Felix Klieser: “It needs to be easy to put into action. The songfulness and the expressive range of sound should always be at the heart, always be the focus.”

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 CD 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. The album will be released on March 1, 2019.
Mozart always composed his works for wind instruments with a specific soloist in mind. Numerous anecdotes about those musicians and their relationship to Mozart abound. This goes for the horn concertos. The horn player Joseph Leutgeb, a close childhood friend of Mozart’s, was more than once the butt of the composer’s innate love of jests, mockery and similar sorts of nonsense. We know that Leutgeb once had to kneel in a corner until Mozart had finished composing, and was then ridiculed as an ass, ox and fool. Even in 1791, the year of his death, Mozart could not resist making fun of his friend, gleefully writing to his wife Constanze that he had called on Leutgeb as “a long-standing close acquaintance from Rome”, prompting Leutgeb to spruce himself up “like on a Sunday, putting on his finest clothes, and beautifully coiffed”. Nor could Mozart resist telling his “Stanzerl” how things had gone: “You can imagine how we laughed at him. I simply must have a fool on hand.”

Felix Klieser first began to take a serious interest in the Horn Trio of Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) at the age of thirteen. Back then he was just a junior student at the College of Music and Drama in Hanover. He bought several different recordings of the work, including one featuring the hornist Peter Damm, whom he was later to meet at a master class in Dresden. “I picked up quickly that Felix was extraordinarily talented. He was able to elicit from the horn a soft, warm sound, a distinctly Romantic horn tone,” says the former horn-player of the Dresden Staatskapelle in high praise of Klieser in the booklet text to the young musician’s new CD entitled “Horn Trios”, released on the Berlin Classics label on September 29, 2017. “The Brahms Trio is the pride of the horn literature,” according to Peter Damm, a view he shares with Felix Klieser. That led him to seek out other such works, perhaps even unknown literature from the horn trio genre. He came across the French composer Frédéric Nicolas Duvernoy (1765–1838), who was hornist at the Paris Opera, Fauré pupil Charles Koechlin (1867–1950) and the Mannheim-born Robert Kahn (1865–1951) who was hounded by the Nazis. The result is a programme of works spanning nearly 100 years of development of the horn trio, which bring Felix Klieser a further step towards his goal: to place the horn centre stage as a colourful and profoundly Romantic instrument. “I am pleased to take you on a new journey through the world of the horn,” he begins his personal foreword to the CD booklet. Such a plan requires the right chamber music partners, whom Felix Klieser has happily found: at the piano sits the outstanding and sensitive Herbert Schuch, while the violin is played by the Ukrainian ARD competition winner Andrej Bielow.

The full spectrum of the horn’s aural range. ECHO prizewinner Felix Klieser now follows his debut featuring Romantic chamber music with a second album: an orchestra recording of works by Joseph and Michael Haydn and by Mozart. This album is a Classical one! While the first of Joseph Haydn’s two horn concertos calls for the high-register horn, the second was composed for its lower-tone brother. Horn players generally specialize in one or other instrument. Felix Klieser plays both. “Addressing the requirements demanded of players of both the high and low horn on one single CD was a challenge for me, but it was a task I relished: it meant I could present the full spectrum of the instrument’s aural range,” enthuses the young hornist, born without arms, who declared his wish to play the horn at the age of four. Unlike the concertos by his famous older brother, Michael Haydn’s Concertino for Horn and Orchestra is seldom heard in concert.

The young hornist Felix Klieser is an exception. Not only is he, at the age of 22, already one of the best horn players in the world, but he has mastered his instrument perfectly despite his handicap. Felix Klieser was born without arms and plays horn with his feet. How does it work? “No problem” says the young artist and shows his tripod. The instrument is attached to it, in range to the mouth. He sits behind it and lets his foot take over what other horn players do with the left hand: operate the valves.

Already as a five-year-old he was given horn lessons after convincing his parents of his firm intention to learn this instrument. Felix Klieser proves himself to be a highly talented musician – at the age of 17 he became a junior student at the Hanover University of Music and Drama. He is awarded the “German Music Prize” in the competition “Jugend musiziert” and is awarded the “Life Award” in the category “Art and Culture”. Klieser played with Sir Simon Rattle at the Berlin Philharmonic and performed with Sting on his world tour. In 2011 he takes up the regular music studies in Hanover. There he meets the pianist Christoph Keymer, who has accompanied him on the piano since then.