‘A bit of a beast’

It’s always a sweet moment when the orchestral thunderheads recede and honey-gold beams stream through the cracks, courtesy of the Lansing Symphony Orchestra’s principal horn player, Corbin Wagner.

But Wagner, the featured soloist at Friday’s (Jan. 10) Masterworks concert, isn’t the kind of blowhard who lights a pipe and talks about his big moments.

“I don’t care so much about what I’m playing,” he said. “I just care about the orchestra playing as a unit, playing well together. I like every concert. I’ve worked long enough that playing one more solo isn’t a big deal anymore.”

Wagner is a nearly 35-year veteran of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and its affiliated ensemble, Detroit Chamber Winds & Strings. He retired from the DSO in 2013, teaches at Michigan State University and enjoys staying in practice with the LSO, where he’s served as principal horn for eight years.

“Of course, I’m in a different group of musicians here that often have secondary jobs,” Wagner said. “But one thing that’s surprising to me is the excellence of the players, compared to all the full-time orchestral players I used to play with in Detroit.”

Wagner admitted that opportunities to play Richard Strauss’ Horn Concerto No. 2, Friday’s featured work, don’t come along every day.

“It’s a real honor to be asked to do something like that,” he said. “It’s a big challenge for the orchestra. Strauss loved to write for instruments to your last 5% of strength, bless his heart. They’re going to have to work pretty hard to figure out their own notes. It’s a bit of a beast.”

Word on the street (at least on the Ringstrasse in Vienna) is that the concerto contains some of the most beautiful music ever written for horn.

“The second movement is just gorgeous, lyrical horn playing,” Wagner said. “The last movement is a romp. It flies up and down the instrument. It’s very exciting, with a big, beautiful, heroic, show-off ending.”

Despite the horn’s long history and enthralling, noble tone, Wagner took it up for the most prosaic of reasons. The Philadelphia-area native was already a musical kid, playing piano and taking “lessons from the neighbor lady,” when his parents pushed him to take band class. The only instruments left in the band closet were a trombone and a French horn.

Might as well go with the horn, Wagner thought.

“That’s how it went,” he shrugged. “No glorious start.”

The horn is a notoriously finicky instrument, prone to producing “clams” (spectacularly wrong notes) at the worst moments, but Wagner said his piano experience enabled him to “correct” himself as he went along.

“I knew what I should be doing,” he said, “so I sounded like I knew what I was doing pretty quick.”

At about the same time Wagner completed his bachelor’s degree at the University of Michigan in 1979, the brilliant and mercurial horn virtuoso Lowell Greer unexpectedly left the Detroit Symphony.

“He was this maverick horn player, and he got bored with the Detroit Symphony and just kind of left, walked out the door, and they didn’t even know he was gone,” Wagner said. “They called me, and that’s how I got the job.” (Greer ended up in Mexico City and went on to an unorthodox career as a player and builder of horns from various historical eras before his death in 2022.)

Like Greer, Wagner embraces the horn in all its forms, all the way back to hunting horns and the fanfares of ancient Roman legions.

Wagner won a national competition playing the natural horn, a shaggy prehistoric beast that has no valves and requires the player to adjust the pitch by controlling suction from the lips and moving a hand in the bell of the horn. At one Detroit concert, he lined up eight different horns on stage and played them all in succession.

“Lowell Greer inspired me to play on all these varied instruments,” Wagner said.

Friday’s concert also features a world premiere by LSO composer-in-residence Jared Miller; Ottorino Respighi’s “Trittico Botticelliano”; and Joseph Haydn’s soaring, elegant Symphony No. 43, “Mercury.”

A night of music scaled to a classical-sized orchestra from the days of Haydn and Mozart not only helps balance the orchestra’s annual budget, offsetting the bigger blowouts that come in fall and spring, but it also gives music director Timothy Muffitt a chance to showcase some great — and less often heard — music.

Haydn was the musician’s musician, a composer of supreme craft and deep humanity, and Muffitt relishes any chance to bring one of his 104 magnificent symphonies to life.

“It’s been 250 years since ‘Mercury’ was written, but this music is still as fresh and engaging as ever,” Muffitt said.

However, sticking to a classical-scaled ensemble doesn’t stick the orchestra in the 18th century. True to Muffitt’s modus operandi, he tucked in a little-known masterpiece by Respighi, inspired by three paintings of Botticelli, to blow the audience away with a piece they probably haven’t heard before.

“It’s a gem,” Muffitt said. “He pulls out ancient music techniques and puts them in this tonally brilliant 20th-century idiom. It just shimmers and glistens and shines.”

Respighi and Strauss were 20th-century men, but there’s even newer music on the slate Friday.

Anyone who has heard music by LSO composer-in-residence Jared Miller knows he loves to deploy all the bells and whistles. What, no harp, no tuba, no vibraphone? No Chinese water gong? Miller compared the challenge to creating a modern three-course meal for a dinner party with your boss “in a kitchen from the 1700s.”

“This is an important dinner, and you don’t want to mess it up,” Miller said. “I had to find a way.”

The result, “Teaser-Feature-Pleaser,” is a three-movement romp that takes a fragment from Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 “and puts it front and center in an ambient and carefully colored slow-motion reorchestration.”

“Within these limited means, I envisioned a universe of compelling sounds I could explore,” Miller said. He compared the closing movement to a dessert: “fun, comforting and delightfully junky.”