Ladislav Bittman

Following on from Hyperion’s hugely popular ‘Romantic Piano Concerto’ series, the ‘Classical Piano Concerto’ focuses on the lesser-known concertos from the dawn of the genre. Between about 1770 and 1820—the high classical period dominated by Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven—musicians including Clementi, Cramer, Dussek, Steibelt, Woelfl and others made their names as composers and performers of piano concertos. This series aims to be the first in-depth recorded survey of this forgotten repertoire.

First recording of Jan Ladislav Dussek's string quartets with the Camesina Quartet: they lay unnoticed in libraries for 200 years, but now the Camesina Quartet has rediscovered them and recorded them for the Musikmanufaktur Berlin label. Dussek composed these string quartets in 1806, shortly before his friend and employer, Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, was killed in battle at Saalfeld. "They are the best that I have written, and neither in the style of Mozart, Haydn nor Pleyel, but in the style of Dussek, and I think that they will attract some attention in the musical world.

Shostakovich wrote the fifth of his fifteen symphonies in 1937 and it was given its first performance in Leningrad in November that year, presented as for the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. It originally carried the sub-title 'The practical answer of a Soviet artist to justified criticism'. This, coming after the events of 1936, led to a certain initial coolness towards the symphony outside Russia. Abroad it was at first seen as an act of submission to an arbitrary cultural dictatorship. Nevertheless there is no reason to suppose that Shostakovich was, at the time, insincere in his recantation and apology, or that his own musical development might not have led him to abjure the evils of Western serialism that had at one time begun to attract him. The condemnation of 1948 was, of course, quite another matter.