The Great Horn of Helm

Giovanni D'Aquila's concerto for alphorn and orchestra takes its title and its story from the second volume of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: the siege of Helm's Deep, where the defenders, at the point of collapse, sound the great horn that echoes through the valley and holds the line until help arrives. The piece was written for the Italian alphorn virtuoso Carlo Torlontano and first performed at the Valle dei Templi in Agrigento, Sicily, with the Musica Contemporanea orchestra under Gaetano Randazzo. Torlontano made it his signature concerto and carried it across Italy and much of Europe, and on to China and Japan.

The work unfolds in a single movement. Its dramatic arc follows the battle, but the composer's own reading of the episode is less heroic than it sounds: the confrontation of good and evil, he has said, chiefly demonstrates the madness of war, which corrupts and destroys without reason. The horn's call sustains the besieged, victory comes, and yet the slaughter that follows leaves no room for rejoicing. The alphorn, an instrument of pastures and distances, is asked here to be a voice of alarm and endurance, and the orchestra around it moves between menace and the wide, open sonorities the instrument naturally suggests.