Alayrac Overtures

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra has established impeccable Mozartian credentials with its award-winning discography, to which Mozart: Opera Arias and Overtures is the latest addition.

No conductor working in the recording studios in the 1960s and beyond did more than Richard Bonynge to recover the sound of the 19th-century ballet, especially in its home of the Paris Opéra-Comique. A central figure in that culture was Adolphe Adam, who supplied vaudevilles, ballets, pastiches and comic operas over the course of three prolific decades. He wrote with extraordinary facility, producing his balletic masterpiece Giselle in three weeks, and creating up to six new shows in a single year for the insatiable Parisian public.

Directly after Johann Strauss the Younger, Franz von Suppé is one of the most famous Austrian composers of the 19th century to have paid special tribute to the so-called light muse. His oeuvre includes nearly three dozen operettas and light operas as well as countless farces and comedies, which he loosened up by framing them with musical numbers.

Domenico Cimarosa was a prolific composer of church and instrumental music, but his reputation rests principally on his operas. During the second half of the 18th century, and until the arrival of Rossini, he was the most successful and performed operatic composer in Europe, and one of the last exponents of the Neapolitan School. His bracing and vivacious overtures in this final volume include the hugely popular Il convito (‘The Banquet’), a triumph in Venice and Florence, as well as some examples of his expressively moving overtures for oratorios.

During his lifetime Friedrich Schneider was regarded as »the respected head of the Northern German school« and was a musical institution in Central Germany. He was active as the court music director in Dessau from 1821 until his death, and for two reasons his fame during these years wasconsiderable: because of his wholehearted support of Beethovens works and because of his own compositions in particular his oratorios. Today his Weltgericht continues to be regarded as a link between Haydn and Mendelssohn. Schneiders Symphony No. 16 displays majestic chords, and its movements of song character win over listening audiences with their charm and naturalness while also offering their share of surprises, mirth, and high spirits.