Kozeluch

Leopold Anton Kozeluch (1747-1818) gehört zu jener Generation von Böhmen, die in Wien im 18. Jahrhundert ihr Glück zu machen suchten. Schon 1781 hatte Kozeluch einen dermaßen guten Ruf, dass er vom Salzburger Erzbischof das Angebot erhielt, als Nachfolger von Mozart das Amt des Hoforganisten zu übernehmen. Seine Klaviertrios müssen sehr beliebt gewesen sein, denn von 1781 bis 1810 waren über 60 davon erschienen.

Leopold Anton Kozeluch, often inaccurately and unjustly portrayed as a scheming opponent of Mozart and Haydn, was actually an extraordinarily popular and successful composer during his own lifetime. Already in 1781 Kozeluch had such an outstanding reputation that the Salzburg archbishop offered him the court organist's post left vacant by Mozart. The Bohemian composer's some 250 works include symphonies, piano music, operas, cantatas, string quartets, and a number of oratorios. Moses in Egypt, an oratorio based on the Book of Exodus from the Old Testament, was premiered in the old Burgtheater in 1787.

Leopold Kozeluch enjoyed such an outstanding reputation already in 1781 that he received an offer from the Archbishop of Salzburg to succeed Mozart as court organist. Kozeluch's piano trios must have been very popular since more than sixty of them appeared in print from 1781 to 1810. The three trios presented here were published in 1798/99 and had been preceded by forty other such works by him. The special feature of these three piano trios lies in his use of melodies from Scottish folk songs in their middle and last movements. Toward the end of the eighteenth century the Edinburgh publisher George Thomson had the idea to have Viennese classical composers set Scottish, Irish, and Welsh folk songs to music with an accompaniment for piano, violin, and violoncello and contacted Haydn, Kozeluch, Pleyel, and (later) Beethoven in the hope of winning them for this project.

Matthias Bamert’s Contemporaries of Mozart project is one of Chandos’ longest-running and most successful recording series. Mozart’s unquestionable genius has tended to eclipse the work of many otherwise excellent composers who were writing at the same time as he. Often successful in their day, many of these composers fell into neglect over subsequent decades and were in some cases almost forgotten. Matthias Bamert has shown just how rich this area of the repertoire is, and each of his CDs received superb critical acclaim.

Bohemian composer Leopold Kozeluch earned himself a negative historical reputation by putting himself forth as a rival to Haydn and Mozart; badmouthing the former to the latter, he received the retort that "even if you were to put the two of us together, you would still not produce a Haydn!" German clarinetist Dieter Klöcker, an indefatigable investigator of the context that surrounded the mighty Viennese trinity, sets out here to rescue Kozeluch from obscurity with performances of a trio of highly idiomatic clarinet pieces. It's hard to disagree with a newspaper critic of the day, quoted in Klöcker's excellent notes, who wrote that Kozeluch showed "great imaginative boldness" but too often offered "mere copies of ordinary life" that were "prettily dressed up like a young woman trying to please her admirers by means of flowers and ribbons."

Although at first we might wonder at the rationale for pairing these two pieces–a double bass concerto and a sinfonia concertante by a (not very well liked) colleague of Mozart and Haydn–on closer inspection we realize that the connection derives from the fact that both pieces were premiered by the same double bass virtuoso. Leopold Kozeluch’s Sinfonia Concertante is scored for the unique combination of mandolin, trumpet, double bass, and piano.

Excellent music by a composer of the classical period not well known today. The performance was in keeping with the music and the sound was very well done. After listening to this music several times, I wondered how music such as this fades into obscurity even for those familiar with the musical history of the time.

One of the benefits of the current “catalog-dumping” trend from major record labels these days is the gathering together of sets such as [this one], offering a trove of music that otherwise would be difficult or impossible to assemble from individual recordings, and many of which are no longer available singly. The 6-CD collection from Concerto Köln is the best overall, comprising some of the finest orchestral works from 18th-century Europe not written by Bach, Haydn, or Mozart, and celebrating the spirit and expressive capabilities and character of a smaller-sized, conductor-less instrumental ensemble. These composers—Dall’Abaco, Kozeluch, Eberl, for instance—deserve to be better-, make that well-known. And there’s no doubt that if there had not been a Haydn or Mozart, we’d be (justifiably) listening to, and marveling at, a lot more Johann Vanhal today—if you don’t know this contemporary of both of those great masters, you owe it to yourself to get acquainted. The Concerto Köln is a premier advocate for all of this repertoire, and having all of it in one economical box is ideal.

– David Vernier