Weber: Peter Schmoll, Overture J8 (Op. 8)

During the 1950s, Karl Böhm made a handful of orchestral recordings for Decca with the Wiener Philharmoniker of, music by, among others, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms Schubert and Weber. The Brahms Symphony is performed with sweep and with classical poise and the music is clearly in the Viennese players’ blood (after all, they premiered the symphony in the Grosser Saal of the Musikverein, the very location where this recording was made). It receives its first international release on Decca CD. Weber’s star has, today, rather receded from our view, his name kept alive by but a handful of pieces. Yet he was, in some ways, a heralder of the dawn of the Romantic tradition and Böhm’s affectionate readings of these Overtures now reappear in the catalogue.

Recording producer: Victor Olof

Recording engineer: Cyril Windebank

Recording location: Grosser Saal, Musikverein, Vienna, Austria, May 1951 (Weber), June 1953 (Brahms)

Although celebrated as the father of German Romantic opera, Carl Maria von Weber is today generally known for one opera alone: Der Freischütz. However the overtures of his other operas and music for stage plays have survived the test of time and are popular concert additions.

The present disc includes ten of these gems, from the overture to Weber’s first surviving opera Peter Schmoll und seine Nachbarn – composed at the age of fifteen – to that of Oberon, written in London for Covent Garden less than two months before his death from tuberculosis, aged 39.

The team of Jean-Jacques Kantorow and the Tapiola Sinfonietta have recorded numerous discs for BIS, by composers as diverse as Saint-Saëns, Mozart, Shostakovich and Rautavaara as well as Weber.

Carl Maria von Weber composed a number of pioneering works for the operatic stage as well as incidental music whose highly attractive scores combine Classical principles of clarity with a unique lyricism and orchestral mastery that would inspire later Romantic composers.

This disc presents overtures from his ever-popular Der Freischütz, Euryanthe and Oberon, as well as from other undeservedly lesser-known operatic works, alongside concert pieces such as the Jubel-Ouvertüre and Der Beherrscher der Geister, and the incidental music for the plays Preciosa and Turandot, all of which amply display his vivid and refined dramatic imagination.

In a recent concert the Dominion Post praised the “superb playing” of the NZSO.