We are delighted to welcome Joshua Davis, finalist in the Nottingham Young Musician of the Year, to perform Mozart's Horn Concerto number 3 during our Mozartian afternoon on the 30th November.
Joshua Davis recently completed his education as a music scholar at Oakham School, where he studied the horn with Jonathan Harris. He's recently performed Straus's Horn Concerto No. 1, Mozart's Horn Concerto No. 4 and given recitals in Oakham, Egleton, and in the Nottingham Chamber Music Festival. In this year’s Nottingham Young Musician of the Year, Joshua was very proud to be selected as the Young Brass Musician of the Year as well as the winner of the Bluecoat Singers prize. He hopes to study music at university following his gap year, which he is currently spending working as a Performing Arts Assistant at a school in North London.
He told us:
“I have enjoyed learning the third concerto for the first time and discovering its many similarities (not least in the choice of key!). Mozart approaches the structure of each movement in a familiar pattern, making it very easy for both the performers and listeners to follow the form. I have particularly enjoyed annotating my score with my own approach to shaping the work’s phrases and dynamics. Seeing a blank page of music with virtually no performance markings from the composer makes me so happy as I can add my own twist to make a performance which is truly my own. The third concerto sits very comfortably within the range of the horn but has presented me with challenges approaching the trills. On a modern horn, a performer can execute these using the valves (moving your fingers very fast), but I have been working on playing lip trills as would have been the approach taken in the Classical era.”