Pip Eastop – Hornplayer

We can all learn from the humble plaice…

Here is my hornplaying friend and colleague, Harry Johnstone, of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. I caught this shot of Harry during a moment of quiet contemplation during the recording sessions for Mozart’s Divertimento, K 334 The recording was for Linn Records. The divertimento features two horns in D and a string quartet with double bass [...]

I know where mine is – and it’s nowhere near my belly. It goes above my stomach and my liver (they both tuck up under it, where it looks dark in the 2nd drawing) and my heart sits right on top of it, almost in the middle (the dotted line is the heart’s outline). Surprised? [...]

I’ll be playing with Impropera at the Serenata Music Festival in Dorset. I’ve been working with Impropera for a year or two now. The singers are extraordinarily talented performers and the shows are hilarious and bizarre. It’s a wonderful sendup of opera and a great night out for anyone who likes to laugh until it [...]

In response to my previous post here, about Gale Lawson, my Mum sent me a photo of my Dad doing similar things in his similar workshop. So, here he is – my wonderful Dad, Peter Eastop – back in 1998, healing a bassoon in his workshop. Soon after this his Parkinson’s got so bad that [...]

Here is Gale Lawson, a wizard with horns (and also a halo, if you look carefully). The valves of my Phatterboy Eb Flugelhorn had been sticking and no amount of cleaning or drowning in valve oil seemed to free them up. Also, the main tuning slide and the first valve slide were too free-moving. The [...]

I’m always delighted to find yet another studio in London that I didn’t previously know about. There seem to be hundreds, tucked away in all sorts of hidden corners and I’m lucky enough to live within cycling distance of a good many of them. I went to Sphere Studio for the first time yesterday.  It’s [...]

This photo was taken after our final rehearsal in New York when Iván Fischer arranged for his two orchestras to meet each other. Members of the Budapest Festival Orchestra who had been attending our rehearsal came up onto the stage to mingle, shake hands and pose with us for photographs taken from the back of [...]

I love the Royal Albert Hall. It’s beautiful to look at whether you’re inside it or outside. Here’s an unusual view of it:

Dear LCO Musicians You will undoubtedly hear this from the MU shortly. We have been made aware of a new EU Directive of payments made to unskilled workers. It says that fees paid to orchestral players should be calculated on the number of notes played per concert. As wind and brass players play fewer notes [...]

I have a beautiful new horn. It was made by Carl Geyer in 1961. I’m told that the number shows the date of its completion, thus: month (July), day (9th) year (’61) If you know anything interesting about Geyer’s wonderful horns I’d be very happy to hear about it. I’m extremely grateful to Tony Halstead [...]

The quote is from another review of the first OAE concert in New York. ……If it requires period instruments to render Beethoven like this, then by all means let’s all buy some 18th century flutes. But I don’t think it does. The attention to detail and precision came out of an ensemble which has re-evaluated all of [...]

“And the ensemble’s three hornists — Phillip Eastop, Martin Lawrence and Gavin Edwards — played with an impressive unity and spot-on intonation.” Read the whole review here:

It’s so nice to get a good review, particularly when it’s somewhere culturally significant – New York, for example: “One of the highlights for me tonight was the truly magnificent work by the horns, who played both with incredible accuracy and wonderful fullness of tone. In the hunting episodes of the “Eroica’s” scherzo they were [...]

I was recently (December 2009) very fortunate to spend a week working with the Philharmonia Orchestra as their guest principal horn. The conductor was Sir Charles Mackerras and we played two concerts the Royal Festival Hall. Concert 1: Wagner night: Overture & Venusberg Music Tannhäuser Prelude & Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde Götterdämmerung (excerpts). Concert [...]

This blog entry is quite a large one. It’s taken from a much earlier version of my website (8 years ago) and I’m re-publishing it here because lots of people have requested to read it again since it disappeared a year or two ago in the re-write and re-design of my website. Teaching my first [...]

I’d like to try to explain why the quality of the starts of notes is so important and I’ll start off by saying something which may sound surprising, or even silly: After you start the note, nobody is listening any more. They are still hearing you – but they’re not hearing what you are playing [...]

Congratulations to everyone in last night’s performance of Lulu! (I have to exclude all those I couldn’t hear from where I was sitting – celli, violas, basses, brass, singers) Hell, no, congratulations to everyone! It really was quite something. Antonio Pappano (conductor) is pretty frightening guy – I’ve never known anyone with such apparently limitless [...]

(Please note: this has nothing whatever to do with hornplaying…..) Well, almost eviction. I had a narrow escape. I live in a very nice flat in West Norwood. I’ve been here for about 15 months and I’ve been really quite happy with it. Imagine my consternation when an eviction notice was delivered through the letterbox. [...]

I’ve been working at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, for some weeks now. At first it was Donizetti’s awful, “L’Elisir d’Amour”. Why awful? Because the first horn part is unremitting torture and is UTTERLY boring. I really resent horn parts which will only get you noticed if you make a mistake. I hated playing [...]

The worst thing about this particular trip is the travel. Today, for example, we had to get from Krakow to Budapest. We did this by means of two flights: Krakow to Frankfurt, then Frankfurt to Budapest. To put this into perspective, try to imagine flying from Manchester to London with a short stop-over in the [...]

I’m away again with Scottish Chamber Orchestra, this time for concerts in Perth (Scotland), Edinburgh, Glasgow, Bydgoszcz and Krakow (Poland), Budapest (Hungary) and Istanbul (Turkey). The best thing about this trip is the music. All seven concerts are of the same program, which includes two of Mozart’s greatest piano concertos, in C minor and Bb [...]

This is a view from the balcony of Air Lyndhurst Studio of the horn section for “Terminator Salvation“.  The players are: Back row, left to right:  Richard Berry – Lawrence Davies – Myself – Martin Owen.  Front row, left to right: Richard Clewes – Jim Rattigan – Nigel Black – Richard Bissill – David Pyatt [...]

(Photo by Martin Owen) Here’s the excellent Andy Wood with me this afternoon at Angel Studios, Islington, London. Andy is normally a trombonist but here he is playing the baritone, a fine and noble instrument, sadly much maligned for its resemblance to an anorexic euphonium.  We were adding a bit of brass band flavour to [...]

“Kolkata”, sounds like the name of an opera by Janacek. I much prefer “Calcutta”, with its whiff of Gilbert & Sullivan and afternoon tea. After the hotel welcoming rituals of melon juice, flowers and a friendly bullet through the forehead, the first thing that happened was that my horn broke (see “my (other) horn broke“). [...]

The first city of our tour was Mumbai. I’ve no idea why its name has been altered and de-romanticised. I much prefer the old name, Bombay, and I don’t think the Indian film industry would do well to change its name to “Mumbywood”. On arriving in the rather comfortable Trident Hotel hotel at Nariman Point [...]

It is my very good fortune to be invited along on a tour of India with Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Over a period of two weeks we will play concerts in six cities: Mumbai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chandigarh and Delhi.

I went with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, to Budapest to play a New Year’s Day concert of Haydn’s Creation.  My horn went ahead of me in the orchestra’s truck, in a nice big padded crate, along with the basses, timps etc. When I got my horn out for the rehearsal – this was New Year’s Eve – [...]

Any excuse to get a photo in here…. Strictly speaking, this has nothing to do with playing the horn, but at least it was taken from the back of one of the three London Philharmonic Orchestra coaches. We were on our way to the concert hall to play a concert.  It’s not really my cup [...]