Ok well...I've been on a huge Respighi kick lately, and (since I havn't really listened to any since I was about twelve) I've been noticing a lot of things that my previously un-trained ears never caught before.

The one thing that I've noticed and havn't been able to figure out is in the fourth movement of Pines. After the orchestration has really opened up in to a really fanare-like, bold, brassy, and in this section even sometimes even harsh, there is some sort of brass echo going on. There are some really subdued in volume, but extremely loud in intensity (as in, having a lot of edge and front on the notes) that plays a two-beat figure that is then echoed, or rather repeated with more emphasis, in the trumpets.

In my recording (Bernstein, NY Phil, they're bonus tracs on a Mussorgsky cd with Pictures At an Exhibition and Night on Bald Mountain) it sounds like they're off-stage trumpets...not in the concert hall like the Verdi requiem, but placed behind the shell (like the vocalists in Holst's "Neptune").

I know this piece calls for six(ish?) ancient Roman war horns to be in this piece and he (Respighi) expected these to be played on saxophone and flugelhorn (correct me if I'm wrong on this). Is this the part that was written for these war horns?

For those of you with this recording, it's at 4:38 that this happens...for those of you without it, it's right at the final key change into Bb major.

I would normally go to consult a score for something like this, but the library in my suburb doesn't have a score section and I don't have time to get to the one at the local university or the one downtown...so thanks in advance to any theories or educated information.