Rossini Symphonies

In Rossini’s year Concerto Classics is pleased to announce a multi-year agreement with one of the most prestigious European orchestral groupings: the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana (OSI), conducted by Markus Poschner and accompanied from time to time by important soloists, is committed, from year 2018 until the whole of year 2020, to the exploration and production of a considerable part of Rossini’s repertoire that is still unedited or that has been rarely performed. The OSI has been making their presence felt on the European music scene with performances that are both innovative and persuasive. The OSI has two main performing venues: one at the Sala Teatro LAC, where it is resident orchestra and performs with leading international artists; the other at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, which provides a performing space for different kinds of musicians with distinctive repertoires.

Schubert’s musical ideas at this time sometimes bear a family resemblance to themes by Mozart, Haydn or Beethoven, but nevertheless his own style was already precociously developed. One would not mistake his Fifth Symphony of 1816 for the work of any other composer, though its difference in character from the Fourth Symphony is equally striking. Here, omitting clarinets, trumpets or timpani, Schubert uses a reduced orchestration in comparison with his previous symphonies.

Rossini himself described these works as «six dreadful sonatas, composed by me on holiday at the home (near Ravenna) of my Maecenas friend Agostino Triossi when I was at a most infantile age, not even having taken a lesson in accompaniment.» Written at the age of twelve, as if only for the pleasure of it, in only three days with an ease reminiscent of Mozart, these compositions exude an entrancing, naive freshness.

Pleyel once was the human symbol of everything balanced and moderate in symphonic music. Even on Cape Cod (Nantucket, to be exact), a Pleyel Society was founded "to purify the taste of the public." Today, his name is recognized for the Parisian concert hall to which it is attached (the Salle Pleyel), and for the pianos that he (and later, his son) had manufactured under the family name, beginning in 1807. Another nugget worth retaining is Pleyel's invention of the miniature score – an innovation associated with the publishing house he founded in the mid-1790s. How did Pleyel have the time for all of this "extracurricular" activity? He did it in the style of Rossini or Sibelius, by giving up composing for about the last thirty years of his life.

Beethoven composed his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies more or less simultaneously during the years 1804-8, and they were both first performed in a memorable all-Beethoven concert in December 1808 that also featured the Fourth Piano Concerto (with Beethoven performing at the piano for the last time in public), the Choral Fantasy, and some other works. Despite being composed together, the Fifth and Sixth inhabit very different musical worlds. The fifth is a marvel of terse, dramatic writing, whereas the Sixth is more leisurely, frankly programmatic, and celebrates the glories of nature and the countryside.

The newest addition to Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra's award-winning survey of Shostakovich's orchestral works takes on symphonies from the opposite ends of the composer's life. Shostakovich's first symphony, composed when he was only 19, announced his presence to the world, while his 15th seemingly grapples with his impending mortality. The Symphony No. 1 in F minor, Op. 10, was written as a graduation piece for his composition class at the Leningrad Conservatory. The composer's youth and the influences of Stravinsky and Prokofiev are evident in the work, but there are plenty of allusions to his later style. Slightly on the slower side overall, the emotion and forward motion of the music is not lost. The Symphony No. 15 in A major, Op. 141, written a few years before the composer's death, though not programmatic, seems to present a look at the cycle of life.

We talk of the nine symphonies of Beethoven and Bruckner but what about the ten of Spohr? Howard Shelley and the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana conclude their survey of his symphonies with two that push the boundaries of the genre itself. Both Nos 7 and 9 are programmatic works, something that Spohr along with Berlioz did much to champion. In the Seventh, titled ‘The earthly and divine in human life’ and inspired by a holiday in Switzerland, he uses not one but two orchestras to great colouristic effect. His Ninth explores that perennial favourite theme of composers from Vivaldi to Glazunov, the Seasons (though Spohr starts with winter rather than spring). As if that were not enough, Howard Shelley also offers the premiere recordings of a brief, powerful Introduzione and a triumphant, at times almost Rossini-ish, Festmarsch.

Though held in high regard by many of his colleagues as being worthy of a pedestal next to Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven in the pantheon of Western music’s great composers, Ludwig (Louis) Spohr (1784–1859), along with Christoph Read more Le nozze di Figaro and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde were composed during Spohr’s lifetime. Eight years younger than Rossini and 13 years Schubert’s junior, Spohr wrote music that is Janus-like, specifically it looks to the formalism and clarity of the Classicists and at the same time sows the seeds of Romanticism via its harmonic and structural experimentation.