Syms Concertantes / Bassoon Concerto

Perhaps more than any other musician, Ignaz Pleyel was fated to learn one of life's most painful lessons: worldly fame is fleeting and quickly fades. Around 1800 he was regarded, next to Haydn and Mozart, as Europe's most successful and popular composer of instrumental music; his orchestral and chamber music - including forty-one symphonies and more than a hundred quintets and quartets, circulated from Scandinavia to Southern Italy in countless printed editions. His star began to fade during the 1820s: Beethoven set the standard, and Pleyel came to be regarded merely as an epigone of his esteemed teacher Haydn. Our spirited recordings of Pleyel's symphonic music (2346669) as well as this new release featuring three of his total of six symphonies concertantes and his bassoon concerto demonstrate that his music really has not deserved to be forgotten. Pleyel turned to the symphonie concertante at a relatively late point in the history of the genre, which had arisen in Paris during the early 1770s and combined the interest in purely orchestral music that had developed around the middle of the century with the appeal of instrumental virtuosity and tonal variety. Pleyel's symphonies concertantes composed between 1786 and 1805 display an astonishing delight in experimentation with unusual movement combinations. In his fourth symphonie concertante Pleyel ventured to experiment with the instrumentation; instead of opposing two or three soloists to the orchestral tutti, he called for an octet consisting of strings and winds and covering the tonal range of a small orchestra. Here Pleyel anticipated an idea that Louis Spohr would realize in his seventh symphony in 1842: a double symphony for two orchestras, one of which consists of soloists.