Consortium Classicum

These overtures have been arranged for small wind ensemble by the Consortium Classicum and the whole project makes for some pretty entertaining listening throughout.
Telemann's music is significantly suited to the sounds of wind instruments and the music comes across as very atmospheric and beautifully imaginative on all counts. The famous 'La Chasse' has all the traits of a hunting scene whilst 'la Joie' is suitably pompous and celebratory in its music. I also enjoyed the rarely heard, 'La Fortune' and the two overtures, which have no title are also splendidly done.

Czerny’s name, even during his own lifetime, became known to the public more as a pedagogue than as a composer worthy of serious consideration. Little has changed up to the present day as his reputation is associated with dreadful memories of piano lessons even though his value and considerable legacy to piano teaching cannot be overestimated.

Said to have been Haydn's favourite pupil Franciszek Lessel has so far evaded a revival of his music. Dieter Klöcker, the director of Consortium Classicum, has assembled scores of the Wind Sextets from the manuscript parts that survive in the Vienna Conservatoire library. The prospect of three wind sextets for two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns and double bass by an unknown composer whose productive life reached almost forty years into the nineteenth century may not fill you with transports of delight. In fact this is fresh and airy music. Lessel is quite startling at the start of Sextet No. 4 with the strangest dissonant grumble before sweeping the listener up into a typically effervescent Mozartean Allegro molto.

This wonderful CD contains some of Ignaz Moscheles' major chamber works, and they are definitely worth a listen! I completely recommend it for Moscheles fans, but also for fans of Beethoven-era chamber music. They are very colorful works due to their unusual instrumentations, which can be hard to find in this period of music. I particularly enjoyed the Grand Septuor Op.88, a mature work that might seem to have been imitating Beethoven, but with a composition date of 1832-33 and quite different instrumentation, was probably an inspiration all of its own. It's very nice to see this side of Moscheles, who is typically a piano composer and didn't often write for any other instruments but piano solo.

On this 1974 recording, Beethoven's Septet, Op. 20 – despised by the composer but still a popular piece of light music – is paired with the less familiar Sextet, Op. 71. The Sextet is an early work despite its high opus number, first written around the time Beethoven moved to Vienna but not offered to a publisher until the era of the mighty Symphony No. 5. This work too Beethoven disparaged, but as annotator Gerhard Pätzig rightly noted, he knew he was releasing something worthwhile – an exceptionally accomplished realization of Classical models.

The short-lived Casimir Cartellieri was definitely a composer of note and this is amply demonstrated in this comprising three clarinet quartets. Dieter Klocker is a comfortable exponent of the many beautiful melodies that are found embedded in the music, very Mozartian in nature and which dances along at a pretty pace!

The combinations of instruments on this disc of Classical-era chamber music – violin, clarinet, and two guitars, or flute, clarinet, violin, two guitars, and cello – look pretty strange, but there's a principle in operation that explains them. Filippo Gragnani (1767-1812), an Italian who went to make his fortune in Russia, was one of a group of composers, little known today, who wrote music in which one or more guitars would stand in for keyboards. In the years around 1800, as it is today, a guitar offered a way of reproducing a full musical texture that was inexpensive compared with a piano.

The browser noticing this disc might be forgiven for thinking that the current trend toward recording obscure works of the classical period had gone too far. Not only does it present a work by Franz Xaver Süssmayr, otherwise known almost exclusively as the man who completed Mozart's Requiem under sleazy circumstances after the composer's death – it also offers that work in an arrangement for winds by an even more obscure composer, Johann Nepomuk Wendt. But give it a spin (or a click): it's not without interest for those with a deep interest in Mozart, especially in the opera The Magic Flute. Süssmayr's opera Der Spiegel von Arkadien (The Mirror of Arcadia) was his biggest success during his own lifetime.

This collection of ten Classical symphonies concertantes was recorded (quadraphonically!) in 1977 and issued as a five-record set by EMI Electrola. Now it has been licensed by CPO and reissued economically on just three CDs.

All but forgotten now, in his day Anton Eberl (1765-1807) was well-known and considered a musical heir of Mozart. Indeed as recently as 1944 one of his symphonies was published as being a newly discovered work of Mozart. During his lifetime a number of his compositions were published under Mozart's name, some of them through as many a fourteen subsequent editions. It is easy to understand why his music could have been mistaken for that of the Salzburg master's. Indeed, he may actually have studied for a time with Mozart who in any case befriended and encouraged him.