Leopold Hofmann

The music director of St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, the city of his birth, Leopold Hofmann (1738-1793) was a prolific composer. The son of a highly educated civil servant and a student of Georg Wagensil, he wrote dozens of symphonies, much chamber music and about 60 concertos, including at least 13 for the flute. Insistent repeated notes in the upper strings set the stage for the flute entrance in the opening `Allegro moderato' in the G Major concerto. Over a walking bass line, the glittering flute dances in and out of the accompanying strings, sometimes soaring above them, at others engaging in delicate interplay.

Leopold Hofmann ( 1738-1793 )was a composer at the time of Mozart and Haydn, along with some 30 other composers who took musical development from the late Baroque into the Classical Period. Hofmann was born before Mozart, and died after Mozart died. These composer's creations were rarely played after their deaths, because of the absolute genius of Mozart and Haydn. Indeed, until Chandos and Naxos recently recorded many of these lessor known musician's works, most of the world was completely ignorant of their originality and beauty.

A new Naxos recording offering two of Hofmann's oboe concerti and two concerti for oboe and harpsichord proves that the prolific Viennese composer could write nice tunes and develop them with spiffy efficiency. Both technical bravura and the expressive colours of the oboe are well explored in these conventional but vivacious three-movement concerti. Stefan Schilli (principal oboe of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra), Jeno Jando (harpsichord) and the Nicolaus Esterhazy Sinfonia under Bela Drahos play with superb panache and discipline; the sound engineering is wonderfully transparent and detailed notes are included.

Written by a contemporary of Mozart, these are wonderfully pleasing pieces.Some of the movements such as the last movement of the B-flat major concerto and the middle movement of the G major concerto are outstanding. The performance is very good and McAslan, the violinist, is outstanding (clean and expressive).

Most of Haydn's concertos are early works, written in the years immediately before or after his engagement at the Esterhazy court in 1761. During that time, he composed four violin concertos, of which three-all except Hob.VIIa, No.2 in D major - survive, none of them in autograph form. Hob.VIIa No.3, in A major turned up only in 1949.

At the end of April 1791, Wolfgang Amadé Mozart applied for the position of second Kapellmeister at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, hoping to inherit the position from Leopold Hofmann, the incumbent Kapellmeister, the City Council of Vienna accepted Mozart’s petition in a strongly worded decree as a basis for the text in the vocal passages of his Sieben Klangräume accompanying the Unfinished Fragments of Mozart’s Requiem KV 626.

As the predecessors of Sony Classical, CBS Masterworks had not a catalogue of ""authenticity-minded"" recordings (the pioneering efforts of Raymond Leppard and Jean-Claude Malgoire notwithstanding), Sony made a distinctive new start and engaged indubitably one of the most experienced producers in the field of early music, Wolf Erichson. If the successes secured by such musicians as Gustav Leonhardt, Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Frans Brüggen in the 1960s were the most visible signs to a wider audience of thorough-going change in the interpretation of music from medieval to baroque times, there was no doubt in assigning a part of the general success to the work of the production teams behind the recordings.