Full | “The Russian Horn Orchestra“ in Rostov on Don | may 2013

In 1751, His Excellency Semyon Naryshkin, Director of Imperial Theatres, decided to give Empress Elizabeth a birthday gift. To accompany hunting, her favourite pastime, he created an orchestra of two dozen hunting horns harmonized in semitones. At the start of the hunt, the Empress was stunned by an unusually forceful, open and unrefined sound of the horn orchestra with no differentiation in terms of timbre. The effect was so powerful that two horn orchestras were immediately founded at the imperial court,