(++++) YOU REALLY HAD TO BE THERE

Orff: Carmina Burana. Chen Reiss, soprano; Reginald Mobley, countertenor; Andrzej Filończyk, baritone; Audivi chorus, Detroit Opera Youth Chorus, and Detroit Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jader Bignamini. Pentatone. $17.99. 

Idil Biret Archive Edition, Volumes 25-26: Rachmaninoff—Piano Concerto No. 3 (two versions); Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Idil Biret, piano; Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Erich Leinsdorf; Leningrad Orchestra conducted by Alexander Dimitreev; Rundfunk der DDR conducted by Heinz Rögner. IBA. $19.99 (2 CDs). 

     A peculiar propensity has developed in some quarters to turn retail releases of live recordings into what are essentially concert souvenirs. It is a matter of packaging, not performance: live recordings have been around for decades, and so has small-scale production of limited-edition discs sold to audiences at concerts. But the trend is now bigger than that, and the new Pentatone CD of Orff’s Carmina Burana, recorded in Detroit at performances from November 7-9, 2025, is a clear example of it. The 28-page booklet bound into the packaging (actually 27 pages, since the back cover is glued to the package) includes nine pages listing every single performer, vocal and instrumental; seven pages of photos; a page of technical acknowledgments; and a page of effusive praise for the participants, written by conductor Jader Bignamini. Since there are also track listings with timings, and a decorative booklet cover, that leaves precious little space for information on the actual music – and precious little attention is just what it gets. Notably and really unconscionably, the words to this fascinating hour-long cantata are entirely omitted; there is not even a link to a website where they can be found. But the words are absolutely key to what Orff was doing in this first and by far the most popular of his Tronfi triptych, which he originally conceived as a multimedia extravaganza and which would still be an unalloyed delight in that form for any troupe bold enough to take it beyond the now-traditional concert-hall performance. The multilingualism of the texts provides a big part of listeners’ experience of Carmina Burana, and the way in which specific segments expand on or diverge from each other simultaneously brings the work a sense of flow and contrast. Leaving this crucial element out of the CD, while including all the well-meaning name listings and self-praise, is the very essence of turning a serious entry in the Carmina Burana catalog into a souvenir program for concert attendees. However, just as a performance, this is indeed a seriously competitive one. The Detroit Symphony throws itself into the music with enthusiasm, the brass and percussion being the standout sections. Among the soloists, Andrzej Filończyk has a full, rich voice that grounds his material well. Chen Reiss takes an operatic approach to her solos but is somewhat standoffish in her delivery: this is no museum piece (despite the age of the texts) but a living, pulsing, highly expressive work, and a bit more personal engagement would have been welcome – although, again, Reiss’ actual singing is very fine. Using a countertenor rather than Orff’s called-for tenor is an interesting decision that should presumably make the roasted swan’s song, in particular, stronger than it is when sung falsetto – but despite Reginald Mobley’s very well-done (pun intended) handling of the material, that specific item should sound more strained than Mobley sounds, since the conceit is that the material is a last-gasp utterance by a bird that is literally being cooked as it sings and emotes. The choruses of adults and young singers are first-rate, sometimes a trifle shaky on pronunciation but every bit as engaged and enthusiastic as they need to be to put the music across with plenty of punch. Bignamimi, for all that he handles the orchestra with considerable skill, has a few slightly odd approaches to tempo, making some slow sections very slow indeed and some speedy ones a bit rushed. Neither singers nor instrumental players have any trouble managing the pacing anywhere, but the cohesiveness of Carmina Burana does suffer a bit from this kind of periodic taffy pull of tempos. Nevertheless, the overall impression of this performance is a very positive one, reaffirming both the cleverness and the accessibility of Orff’s music and undoubtedly having given the Detroit audience a bang-up time (actually several of those over several days). Audience members with fond memories of this Carmina Burana will in fact want this CD as a souvenir – but it would have been nice if Pentatone had packaged it with more of an eye toward at-large attractiveness for people who were not in the concert hall when the recording was made. 

     The “souvenir” element of recordings is even more strongly present – by intent – in the long-running Idil Biret Archive series, which has been around for the better part of two decades. The whole point of this sequence is to dig up older recordings by Biret (born 1941) and make them available to modern audiences, often for the first time – and to showcase the skill and musical understanding that Biret has brought to performances worldwide ever since she was a pianistic child star in the 1940s. Even within this series, though, some releases are more souvenir-ish than others; and one such is the two-CD Rachmaninoff-focused one labeled as volumes 25 and 26. The music is almost secondary to the time capsule of the first disc, which is wholly devoted to November 22, 1963 – the day of Biret’s U.S. debut, the day after her 22^nd birthday, and the day on which President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The horrible news came to Symphony Hall in Boston during the concert in which Biret was to perform – and hit even harder there than elsewhere, if that can be imagined, because of the Kennedy family’s deep Boston roots. This disc includes the announcement by Erich Leinsdorf, remarks by Boston Symphony board president Henry Cabot, commentary by announcer Martin Bookspan that was added when the performance was rebroadcast, and the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto itself – performed after Cabot eloquently suggested that music might provide some consolation to the audience. There is also a snippet of the funeral march from Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony, which Leinsdorf had the orchestra play immediately after he announced the shooting. It is hard to imagine many listeners wanting to replay, much less relive, the events of that day, by hearing and rehearing the verbal portions of this CD. But they do stand as scene-setters for a remarkably tightly controlled, fast-paced and detail-oriented performance in which Biret and Leinsdorf subsume whatever their personal feelings were into music whose capacity for uplift here proves greater than would otherwise have been expected – most notably in the near-breakneck pace of the concerto’s very last pages, which (from the audience reaction) clearly brought people immense, if only momentary, pleasure. The second disc in this IBA release features a performance of the same concerto from almost 20 years later – July 2, 1983 – and displays Biret in a very different mood: this is a significantly more-expansive, more broadly conceived reading that tends to bog down in places but that shows Biret’s ability to meld with the Soviet-era Leningrad Orchestra under Alexander Dimitreev just as effortlessly as she did with Leinsdorf in Boston. This disc also includes an “Iron Curtain” performance of Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, from April 14, 1985, with the Radio Symphony Orchestra in East Berlin under Heinz Rögner – a creditable reading, certainly, although a touch heavy-handed, with both Biret and Rögner downplaying the lighter and more-humorous elements of the piece in favor of emphasizing its serious ones. Biret’s technical skill is everywhere apparent, even when the recordings themselves are not of the best – the sound in the 1983 concerto is actually inferior to that of the 1963 performance. But top-quality aural presentation is not the point of the Idil Biret Archive recordings, and especially not of this recording, with its historical emphasis front-and-center. The “souvenir” element here carries through to the booklet material: the names of the orchestras and conductors on the second disc are not given anywhere in the track listings and have to be ferreted out by reading the notes, and those notes themselves get into very considerable detail about the ins and outs of concert planning and eventual presentation, with almost the entire 16 pages devoted to the before, during and after of November 22, 1963. Like the Idil Biret Archive Edition in general, this recording is intended almost entirely for Biret enthusiasts – but to an even greater degree than other releases in the series, it is for listeners interested in Biret in historical context as much as in Biret displaying her pianistic prowess in the music she performs.

(++++) BITS AND PIECES

Bruckner: Symphony No. 9, including sketches of the finale. Altomonte Orchester St. Florian conducted by Rémy Ballot. Gramola. $24.99. 

Bach: Concerto for Three Violins in D, BWV 1064R; Concerto for Two Violins in D minor, BWV 1043; Orchestral Suite No. 3—Air on the G String; Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor, BWV 1041; Concerto for Oboe and Violin in C Minor, BWV 1060R. Elsa Claveria, Friederike Jahn and Darius Kaunas, violins; Frauke Tautorus, oboe; Neubrandenburg Philharmonic conducted by Daniel Geiss. PASCHENrecords. $18.99. 

     The superlative Bruckner cycle led by Rémy Ballot turns out to have some unexpected elements still in store. The main sequence of symphonies was assembled year by year from 2013 to 2023 – with the Ninth appearing in 2015 in a very unusual two-CD set giving the work for orchestra and, separately, presenting Karl Grunsky’s 1911 version for two pianos, which the musicologist based on the Ferdinand Löwe arrangement of 1895. As intriguing as it was to hear the symphony in two guises, both were the Ninth in three-movement form, and it has long been known – indeed, since Bruckner’s own lifetime – that there was supposed to be a fourth movement. Ballot’s decision not to offer any of the fine completions/reconstructions of the finale was disappointing, although understandable. But now Ballot, in another of the inimitable surprises of his Bruckner sequence, has conducted the Ninth with the finale – sort of. Ballot’s new Gramola recording – which comes in at an astonishing 90 minutes on a single disc – offers a 2024 orchestral presentation of the Ninth in three-movement form, followed by the sketches that Bruckner left behind for the finale. Just the sketches: eight short fragments of what would have become the finale if Bruckner had lived to complete it. Arranged in what would have been their order of appearance in the symphony’s last movement, and offered “completely incomplete,” with no attempt to connect them, these one-to-five-minute snippets are all that Bruckner left for those who, in more-recent times, have sought to bring his Ninth to a satisfactory conclusion. Aside from a few additional sketches of just a couple of measures – not enough music to be worth performing – these fragments are everything that we have to indicate where Bruckner might have gone with his fourth movement, except that he would no doubt have incorporated them into the overall plan in ways that he would have modified from what he left behind. We will never really know what Bruckner would have done with these sketches, which last, in the aggregate, about 17 minutes – perhaps two-thirds of the length of the planned finale. What Ballot does, though, is allow listeners to speculate on their own about where Bruckner’s Ninth could have gone, what could have been built using this scaffolding. That is a fascinating musical/emotional exercise – and an unnecessary one for anybody disinclined to contemplate what might have been, since Ballot’s full-fledged performance of the three completed movements is at least as stately, elegant, knowing and emotionally charged here as was his 2015 orchestral presentation. What this CD tries to do is nothing new – as far back as 1960, conductor Max Goberman (1911-1962) recorded Schubert’s “Unfinished” symphony with the sketches of its third movement, which faded to unorchestrated piano material and then eerily into nothingness. But this is a new approach to Bruckner’s Ninth, whose three-movement version has always been magnificent but never satisfactory, no matter how hard some musicians and scholars have tried to argue it into a sense of finality. Aside from the overall beauty of Ballot’s performance with the Altomonte Orchester St. Florian – the primary orchestra used throughout Ballot’s Bruckner cycle – this release is genuinely valuable for allowing listeners to experience Bruckner’s Ninth with as much mystery and uncertainty as they wish. Listen to the work in three-movement form, listen to its three completed movements and the surviving elements of the fourth, or choose a non-Ballot recording such as Gerd Schaller’s to hear the full four-movement version: in any of these presentations, Bruckner’s Ninth continues to engage and enthrall, and Ballot continues to show himself a first-rate Bruckner conductor with an unmatched sense of both traditional and nontraditional ways to bring the Bruckner symphonies to vivid and deeply meaningful life. 

     Bruckner and Schubert symphonies are scarcely the only works whose provenance and final versions are less than 100% clear. A number of pieces by Bach are also uncertain in various ways – and Daniel Geiss and the Neubrandenburg Philharmonic intriguingly tackle some of them for a PASCHENrecords release called “The Bach Project.” The five pieces here are an interesting mixture of the known and unknown. Violin Concerto No. 1 and the famous Air movement from the third orchestral suite are thoroughly authentic in the forms heard here. Things are more complicated, however, when it comes to the other three works. The Concerto for Three Violins in D, BWV 1064R, is known as a three-harpsichord concerto, but is lost in the three-violin form in which it is thought to have originated – so what we have here is a reconstruction, up a tone from C to D. And the Concerto for Oboe and Violin in C Minor, BWV 1060R, has a similar history: in Bach’s final version, labeled BWV 1060 without the “R,” it is for two harpsichords, but its original version was probably for two violins, and it is here offered in that re-created form. As for the Concerto for Two Violins in D minor, BWV 1043, this is Bach’s own, earlier version of what would eventually emerge as his two-harpsichord concerto, BWV 1062. All this reuse and rearrangement of material was entirely normal and expected in the Baroque era – and, indeed, afterwards. What is intriguing, though, is the exceptionally careful way in which Bach mapped a concerto from one instrument or set of instruments to another – care to which later arrangers (of works whose original form remains unknown) were at pains to adhere. The Neubrandenburg Philharmonic regards itself as a constant “work in progress” of sorts, and assembled this CD – all of whose soloists are members of the orchestra – as a 75^th-anniversary offering reflective of its roots and its philosophy. Listeners, however, need know nothing of the genesis of the recording in order to appreciate the verve, elegance and sense of delight with which the musicians handle all the pieces. These performers understand Bach intellectually and also feel his music emotionally: their playing is historically informed, never dry, always well-balanced between soloists and ensemble, and remarkably attentive to detail – the positively jaunty finale of BWV 1041 and the interplay of the oboe’s bounce with the skittering violin figures in the finale of BWV 1060R are just two examples among many here. Interestingly, three of the five offerings on this disc are in minor keys, a fact that lends an aura of warmth to the CD as a whole and enhances the impression of a small chamber orchestra experiencing a sense of connection among its members and bringing forth that feeling, through the music, to an audience at large. There is nothing unusual about regarding Bach as foundational to an orchestra’s sense of self and of ensemble, but the stylish care with which the Neubrandenburg Philharmonic presents these Bach selections shows that the group is thoroughly versed in the careful proportions and well-wrought balance that are two of Bach’s primary characteristics – both in works that have come down to the present in Bach’s final form and in ones whose original versions are missing but that can, with care, be brought back in reconstructions as apt and enjoyable as those heard here.

(++++) INSTRUMENTS IN TRANSITION

Mozart: Piano Trios KV 254, 442, 496, 502, 542, 548, and 564. Trio Parnassus (Wolf-Dieter Streicher, violin; Michael Groß, cello; Chia Chou, piano). MDG Preziosa. $49.99 (2 CDs). 

Rudy Wiedoeft: Music for Saxophone. Chad Smith, saxophones; Mikaela Bennett, voice; Lynette Wardle, harp; Dalton Ridenhour, piano; Sinfonia of London conducted by John Wilson. Chandos. $21.99 (SACD). 

     Mozart’s music for piano trio floats so effortlessly and with such elegance and eloquence that it is surprising to realize that it was, to an extent, trailblazing: along with Haydn, Mozart was largely responsible for creating a piano-trio form that was more than a piano sonata with strings obbligato. The violin and, to an even greater extent, the cello were relegated to distinctly subsidiary roles in most piano trios of the early Classical era, with the violin essentially supporting the piano’s right-hand melody and the cello underlining the left-hand accompaniment. It was only gradually that the trio became a genuine collaboration among equals; and although Mozart never brought it to the height of his greatest string trio, K. 563, his seven works for piano trio do show the form emerging into a worthwhile addition to chamber music in its own right. Performances as good as those of Trio Parnassus on a two-CD release from MDG Preziosa further enhance the standing of Mozart’s piano trios, although a more-thoughtful arrangement of the works on the discs would better have clarified Mozart’s growing engagement with the development of the form. The earliest work in this re-release of well-recorded 1990 performances is KV 254 in B-flat, which, labeled as Divertimento à 3, is in the same three-movement form as all of Mozart’s piano-trio pieces but is closer to a piano-and-violin sonata than a true trio – although it shares its gracefulness with all the other works recorded here. Mozart’s next foray into the form came in 1786, a decade after KV 254, when he wrote what he labeled a Terzette of trios: KV 496 and 502 (wrongly labeled 469 and 503 in this release) for piano trio plus the “Kegelstatt,” KV 498, for piano, clarinet and viola. The two piano trios in the Terzette start to show the cello as a full member of the ensemble, even though the piano and violin still tend to dominate the material. And this instrumental development extends further in KV 542, 548 and 564, which not only treat all the instruments as equals but also have the piano, formerly so dominant, used as accompaniment from time to time – a significant rethinking of the form. Mozart’s creativity shows itself in other ways as well in these works, notably through his combination in some finales of rondo and sonata elements. Trio Parnassus plays all the pieces in suitably upbeat fashion – all are in major keys and are comparatively light – with the precision of ensemble playing especially suitable to this repertoire. And although the recording’s sequencing of works – KV 502, 542, 496, 254, 548, 564 and 442 – has no particular justification, placing KV 442 last does make sense, since this three-movement grouping is not a complete trio by Mozart but an assemblage of three fragments put together by Maximilian Stadler after the composer’s death. Its placement as a kind of appendix to the fully formed trios provides a welcome chance to experience some additional Mozart thinking about the form, with the first of the three pieces – an Allegro in D minor – being especially welcome for a deeper if scarcely more somber hue than generally appears elsewhere in these works. 

     There is a certain subtlety to the instrumental changes observable in Mozart’s works for piano trio – but much less of one when it comes to the evolution of the saxophone after Belgian musician Adolphe Sax invented it in the 1840s. Sax played the flute and clarinet and actually redesigned the bass clarinet to its still-extant design, but his saxophone (the only one of several of his “sax” instruments that is still in use) struggled to find a place in classical music. It started to come into its own in the 1920s in a form called “C melody” or “C tenor,” whose size lies between those of the alto and tenor sax and whose pitch is a whole tone above the B-flat of the tenor saxophone. The C melody instrument, which does not transpose, became popular among families for its ability to join with home pianos, allowing players to read the music as written for the keyboard. It declined and essentially disappeared during the Great Depression because people could no longer afford the luxury of buying it, and by the mid-20^th century it was fully supplanted by the saxophones that remain in use today. During the 1920s, though, the C melody sax – and saxophone music in general – had something of a heyday, led in large part by Rudy Wiedoeft (1893-1940), a virtuoso clarinetist who became enamored of the saxophone after discovering previously untapped bounce, joy and exhilaration in it at a time when the Jazz Age was just starting to flourish. That is the time period explored by Chad Smith and the Sinfonia of London under John Wilson on a tremendously peppy Chandos SACD whose 18 tracks make use of the C melody and other saxophones in thoroughly delightful ways. Virtually all the music here is by Wiedoeft, sometimes as solo composer and sometimes in collaboration, and Smith’s ebullience in performance certainly does justice to Wiedoeft’s own, which can still be heard on a few recordings (and seen in some old film shorts). The titles of the works, which date to the years 1916-1932 and mostly cluster in the early 1920s, give a good idea of the sort of material at which Wiedoeft believed the saxophone excelled: Sax-O-Trix, Saxophobia (in two versions, one a historical performance), Sax-O-Phun, Saxema and Saxarella are all offered, along with Valse Mazanetta, Valse Llewellyn, Valse Sonia and Valse Vanité. A couple of vocal trifles vary the sound a bit: Kiss Me Again by Victor Herbert and You Forgot to Remember by Irving Berlin. There are also a couple of transcriptions for saxophone (Gloria and Canary Cottage-One Step) and even a world première recording (Cloudy Days), although for most listeners everything on the disc will be previously unheard. The remaining tracks are called Dans L’Orient, Rubenola, and Danse Hongroise. Clearly there is nothing here intended to be less than brightly entertaining – although the expressive potential of the saxophone does come through when appropriate, always at a popular-music rather than concert-hall level. The recording is better heard in small doses, since nearly an hour of this uniformly lighthearted music tends to become a bit wearing: no matter how well Smith plays and Wilson and the Sinfonia of London accompany him, there is a sameness of sound and technical display in these pieces that eventually undermines their historical fascination. Still, the vocal entries and some intriguing instrumental mixtures – Danse L’Orient uses harp, while Rubenola includes violin and piano – help keep matters interesting. There is nothing profound here, really nothing beyond pure entertainment from a time when the saxophone was just coming into its own – and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. The recording is so well-played and the saxophone performance techniques (and antics) that these pieces require are so engaging in small doses that the release serves as a very enjoyable tribute not only to an instrument in a form that is rarely heard nowadays but also to a composer/performer who has been more thoroughly forgotten than the now-obscure type of saxophone with which he made his musical mark.

(++++) SOUNDS OF THE RARELY HEARD

Lost American Violin Sonatas, Volume 2. Solomia Soroka, violin; Phillip Silver and Arthur Greene, piano. Toccata Next. $18.99. 

Franz Krommer: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2; Concertino for Flute, Oboe and Violin. Klára Mach Jasenčáková, flute; Vojtěch Podroužek, oboe; Markéta Čepická, violin; Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice conducted by Marek Štilec. Naxos. $19.99. 

Music for Viola da Gamba by Marin Marais, Antoine Forqueray, Le Sieur de Machy, and Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe. Caroline Nicolas, viola da gamba; Kevin Payne, theorbo. AVIE. $19.99. 

     The second Lost American Violin Sonatas release from Toccata Next again delves largely into Romantic sensibilities as expressed by three virtually unknown composers, two of whom lived in and through the Romantic era itself and one of whom postdates it. This time, Solomia Soroka, Phillip Silver and Arthur Greene focus on Clara Kathleen Rogers (1844-1931), Albert Stoessel (1894-1943), and Julius Chajes (1910-1985). Only one work here, Stoessel’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, has ever been recorded before, so the CD continues the first volume’s exploration of worthy but neglected repertoire. It must be said, though, that to some degree, the neglect is understandable: all of these sonatas are well-crafted and well-assembled, but only the one by Chajes shows sufficient originality to be worthy of somewhat-more-frequent performance. Rogers’ 1888 sonata, in D minor, bears the title Sonata Dramatico (spelled that way), but it is more dour than dramatic – at least until the final, longest movement, which offers broader gestures and more strongly felt pacing. That concluding Allegro giojoso also gives more prominence to the piano, which is distinctly in the violin's shadow in the first two movements: in the finale, although still subservient, it is more participatory. The more-or-less Brahmsian sound of the music is carried through the entire sonata, with the eventual exploration of the highest register of both instruments well-handled and more original than much of what has come before. Stoessel’s sonata, which dates to about 1920, is warmer than Rogers’ from the start and more sweeping. Despite its date, it is actually more imbued than hers with Romantic sensibility, mixed with a certain degree of Impressionism. The G major home key notwithstanding, the first movement is distinctly melancholic, even autumnal – again in Brahmsian mode, although Stoessel’s writing is somewhat on the turgid side. Stoessel’s harmonic language is a bit more extended than Rogers’, which is not a great surprise in light of the dates of the two sonatas, but Stoessel’s work remains in the service of emotional expression throughout. Indeed, it is somewhat unremittingly sad through its first two movements. The concluding third movement, however, almost sounds as if it belongs to a different work: it is much brighter from the start, with the violin skipping about as the piano figurations dance here and there across the keyboard. A middle section slows matters down and returns to the mood of the first movement before the work ends in a way that justifies the finale’s Allegro scherzando tempo marking. More intriguing than either the Rogers sonata or Stoessel’s is the A minor one by Chajes, written significantly later than the others (early 1940s) and sounding at times unusual to the point of idiosyncrasy. It opens with very considerable intensity but soon swerves to a curious section in which the violin's journeys up and down its range have an almost electronic sound to them. Later, a single long-held violin note persists over a passionate piano passage in an unusual use of the instruments’ respective sounds. This is a four-movement work whose two internal movements are quite short. The second, titled “Mourner’s Prayer,” has a feeling not of despair but of resignation, with repeated low piano notes sounding like the incessant tolling of a funeral bell. The third, although labeled Scherzo, does not feel like one for most of its duration: the initial exclamation of the instruments in turn soon gives way to expressive, piano-dominated material before a frisky violin passage finally makes the movement sound like a Scherzo, pulling the piano along into lighter, higher-register territory. In the finale, the mood shifts repeatedly. This movement is somewhat meandering, with touches of acerbity but plenty of warmth and lyricism as well. All in all, the Chajes sonata is a multifaceted work that never quite settles into any particular mood for long. It is interesting in many ways, if too uncentered in mood and style to be truly compelling. Nevertheless, this second forgotten-sonata disc will whet the appetite of adventurous listeners for more to come. 

     Skilled composers have become footnotes in musical history for hundreds of years, not just in the Romantic and post-Romantic time periods. A number of contemporaries of Mozart created more-than-serviceable works – often while in service to the nobility of the time – and then fell quickly into obscurity. This is why the names of Carl Philipp Stamitz, Ignace Joseph Pleyel, Leopold Koželuch, Paul Wranitzky and other once-notable musical creators born in the 1740s and 1750s have almost completely faded from memory. A new Naxos CD featuring works by Franz Krommer (1759-1831) shows what has been lost by relegating these lesser lights to obscurity – although it also helps explain their neglect. Krommer wrote about eight or 10 symphonies – some are lost and some numbering is obscure – and broke very little new ground in any of them, although some later ones reached out a bit beyond the Haydnesque. Not very far, though: as the excellent performances by the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice under Marek Štilec show, Krommer was thoroughly mired in the past – certainly in the symphonies Nos. 1 and 2, the first of which was written after Haydn finished his “London” dozen and the second of which appeared at the same time as Beethoven’s Second. By comparison with all those much greater and more exploratory works, Krommer’s are light, almost frothy, delightfully tuneful and with especially jaunty finales. But that is all they are: light entertainment in a style that greater composers had long since moved beyond. The symphonies, in F and D respectively, are pleasant throughout and deserve to be thought of as “easy listening” for the Habsburg aristocracy that Krommer served. And to be fair, if their pleasures are surface-level, they do not pretend to be anything else: in some ways they are refreshing in the way they are free of any sort of pretense to significance. Štilec and the ensemble handle them with plenty of enthusiasm and do not try to overstate their modest charm. The result is highly pleasurable music-making. The highlight of the CD, though, is not the symphonies but the Concertino for Flute, Oboe and Violin, which – its minimizing title notwithstanding – is actually longer than either symphony. It is in five movements and is essentially a serenade, showcasing, in this recording, three first-chair players of the very fine orchestra. Unpretentious, inconsequential, but charming from start to finish, the Concertino shows that Krommer had real skill in writing for the three solo instruments and setting them gently against the ensemble. The shortest movement, an Adagio placed third – between two Menuetto entries – is essentially devoid of emotion despite a brief dip into the minor; and this shows both the strengths and weaknesses of Krommer’s approach, which was highly successful for entertaining listeners of his time but which understandably fell into disfavor afterwards as tastes, audiences, and expectations of music changed. 

     It can be argued that changing musical interests from the Baroque era to the Classical period were every bit as substantial as those from the Classical to the Romantic. There was an especially great changeover of instrumentation in the 18^th century, with compositions involving viola da gamba, theorbo and other former staples declining rapidly and eventually vanishing except when music could be updated to newer performance practices. In more-recent times, a revival of interest involving not only older pieces of music but also the original instruments for which the works were written has produced a small but strongly committed crop of performers whose dedication results in some fascinating listening experiences. The works played by Caroline Nicolas on viola da gamba and Kevin Payne on theorbo certainly belong to a much earlier aural environment than the works of Krommer, but it is worth remembering that the two composers mainly featured on this AVIE disc both lived nearly into the Classical time period: Antoine Forqueray from 1672 until 1745, just 14 years prior to Krommer’s birth, and Marin Marais from 1656 to 1728. Yet the sound of Nicolas’ instrument is so different from that of later strings that hearing just the first notes of any piece on the CD will transport listeners to a time that seems (and musically is) very long ago indeed. In a sense, everything on the disc is a miniature: only one of the 20 tracks lasts as long as five minutes. But most of these little pieces were originally conceived as parts of a larger whole, being taken from suites of the type well-known from Bach and Telemann and eventually carried into later times and emerging in guises such as that of Krommer’s Concertino. The selections that Nicolas and Payne offer, far from being the stylized dance forms familiar elsewhere, are almost pure dances: the clarity of rhythm, attentiveness to pacing and evenness of presentation make these small gems highly danceable. The occasional ornamental flourishes, such as the quick scalar trips in the Allemande & Double from Marais’ Suite No. 7, serve to highlight the comparative plainness of most of the movements, which charm through elegance, daintiness where appropriate, and consistency of engagement throughout. Works by Marais dominate the CD (12 tracks), being scattered throughout the recording; the six movements of Forqueray’s Suite No. 1 in D minor are offered as a group. The remaining two entries are for solo viola da gamba: a Prelude by Le Sieur de Machy (fl. 1655-1700) and a Chaconne by Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe (c. 1640-c. 1700). The two solos give Nicolas a chance to explore the sound of her instrument – and her own capabilities in playing it – in somewhat different ways from those included in the movements involving theorbo. She displays complete mastery of fingering, tone production, rhythm, and the sweetly resonant sound that the viola da gamba shares only distantly with more-familiar, more-modern stringed instruments. Her ability to evoke contrasting feelings from single-string and chordal passages is exceptional, and her overall approach to all the music argues convincingly that in the right hands and beneath the right fingers, the viola da gamba’s sound is transformed from an exotic rarity to something highly engaging and often genuinely moving – a trip back through time, to be sure, but one well worth making and still having a great deal to offer so many centuries after the age of Marais and Forqueray.