Handel Masterworks

Handel’s Water Music? Beethoven’s 5th? Judas Maccabeus? Familiar strains from these masterworks appear on this delightful new disc by baroque cellists Phoebe Carrai and Tanya Tomkins, but the music itself is by the little-known 19th-century German cellist and composer Friederich August Kummer, who adds his personal stamp to these highly entertaining duets whilst paying homage to the baroque and classical masters. In his day, Kummer was a renowned performer and pedagogue who was principal cellist of the Dresden Opera. Close friends and musical collaborators included Franz Schubert and Felix Mendelssohn. He was the first professor of cello at the Dresden Conservatoire when it opened in 1856.

This massive new reissue from Eugene Ormandy’s stereo discography collects all the Columbia Masterworks recordings he made in Philadelphia between the early 1960s and early 1980s. Sony Classical’s new 94-CD box set once again demonstrates what noted critic Jed Distler, reviewing the previous instalment of this ambitious project “The Columbia Stereo Collection 1958–1963” in Gramophone’s December 2023 issue, characterized as “the Philadelphia Orchestra’s brilliance and versatility as well as Ormandy’s unflappable consistency and habitually underestimated interpretative gifts”.

During his own lifetime, Sammartini was considered to be one of the most talented composers of his generation. John Hawkins wrote in 1776: “His singularities can only be ascribed to that boldness and self-possession which are ever the concomitants of genius.”