il Gardellino

In 1764 a couple of German musicians lodged together in London. They shared a sort of common background, for one was the youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach, newly arrived in town to write opera, and the other, Carl Friedrich Abel, had been Bach’s student back in Leipzig more than a decade earlier. He was in town to make his living as a composer of instrumental works and as a performer on that now-anachronistic instrument the viola da gamba. The two apparently hit it off quite well, for they soon conspired to develop the famed Bach-Abel concert series that became a fixture in the city for more than a decade and a half. Given that they also contrived to perform as well, it is not surprising that both men created a wide variety of works for their instruments, Bach on the keyboard and Abel on his gamba.

Ernst Eichner was a composer of the so-called Mannheim School who fell into obscurity as the Romantics discarded the light music of the Classical era, and whose music has until now been overlooked in the general late eighteenth century revival – probably because the focus on music of the period has shifted from Mannheim to Vienna. But of course the influence of the Mannheim composers was continent-wide; Mozart's symphonies and keyboard sonatas from the late 1770s, for example, can't be understood without it. The chief musical attraction in Mannheim was the court orchestra maintained by the Elector of the Palatinate, outsized to match the Elector's mega-palace (at the end of World War II it was about the only thing standing).

Fasch is now recognised as one of the most important innovators in the transitional period between Bach and Haydn. These concertos for combinations such as 2 oboes da silva, 2 violas, 2 bassoons and basso continuo illustrate his supreme skill.