On 9th February 1784, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart entered the Piano Concerto No.14 in E flat major in his personal catalogue of works, and exactly 13 months later he completed his 21st concerto, in C major. In little over a year he had composed seven piano concertos – all of them highly individual works exploring the relationship between solo instrument and orchestra in different ways, as the two concertos recorded here demonstrate. The E flat major concerto is written for piano and strings, with ad libitum parts for oboes and horns, and can according to Mozart's own instructions be performed with just a string quartet accompaniment. As might be expected there is a chamber music quality to the work, with the piano closely integrated into the ensemble. In complete contrast, Piano Concerto No.21 is written for a much larger orchestra, with flute and pairs of oboes, bassoons, horns, trumpets and timpani as well as strings. It is one of Mozart's most popular, but also most technically challenging concertos – when commenting on the score, his father Leopold noted that it was 'astonishingly difficult'. Largely because of its slow movement theme (famously used in the film Elvira Madigan), the C major Concerto has become perhaps Mozart’s most widely known. Separating the two concertos on this disc is the concert aria Ch'io mi scordi di te? (‘That I forget you?’) for soprano and orchestra with an obbligato piano part. Mozart composed the work in 1786 for the English soprano Nancy Storace and himself, possibly as a farewell gift to Storace, who was returning to London after a stay in Vienna during which she had sung the role of Susanna in the first production of The Marriage of Figaro. Another internationally acclaimed English soprano, Carolyn Sampson, joins Ronald Brautigam and the Kölner Akademie on this the seventh instalment of a series which goes from strength to strength: its predecessor (BIS-2044) was recently made an Editor's Choice in Gramophone, as well as an 'IRR Outstanding' in International Record Guide.

The sound of the horn epitomized stormy emotions for composers of Romantic music. Robert Schumann is said to have spoken of the horn as being the orchestra's soul. For poets, the horn's sound was a symbol of the soul's longing. For horn players, however, what was at stake for much of the Romantic period was the soul of the horn itself, for it was an instrument that faced experiment and change occasioned by new technology, notably the invention of the valve. This recording explores and illustrates this important era in the evolution of the horn.

Madame Hélène de Montgeroult (1764–1836) lived in a time when significant historical events were shaping France and Europe. Montgeroult's musical oeuvre is distinguished by its interpretive versatility. The collection of nine sonatas presented here spans from 1795 to 1811. The three sonatas that make up her Op. 1 are three distinct pieces, each with its own mood. The Op. 2 set was engraved in Paris in 1800, with reprints issued in the ensuing years testament to its success at the time. It can be seen as an expansion of Op. 1's stylistic language, sharing the same compositional features, but greater in length. With the last three sonatas, Op. 5, published by Érard in 1811, Montgeroult rose to mastery. These sonatas are considerably longer and more complex in their formal structure than their predecessors. Overall, the three sonatas in the Op. 5 set expand the form while retaining a Classical-like structure, comparable to later Clementi sonatas or those of other composers of the time, and forecasting the later experimentations of the Romantic generation.

Johann Ladislaus Dussek (1760–1812) was regarded by his contemporaries as one of the foremost keyboard performers and composers of his age. Over a span of three decades, Dussek completed nearly 300 compositions, most of which involve a keyboard instrument. The sonata as a genre holds a special position in his overall oeuvre: keyboard sonatas were among his first published pieces in the early 1780s, and the sonata Op. 77 in F minor was to be his last work before his death in 1812.

This set is the result of an extensive recording project using the combined resources of eight excellent fortepianists to produce the first comprehensive recording of Dussek’s keyboard sonatas on period instruments. Listeners are invited to take a journey through the brilliant, harmonically beautiful and expressive music of one of the most fascinating composers at the threshold of early Romanticism. While in modern times piano building has been largely standardised, 18th-century instruments were very personal works of art, and their construction differed from town to town and from builder to builder, and even within one builder’s output. The distance between cities as far apart as London and Vienna resulted in two distinct schools of piano building: the “English” and the “Viennese.”

The formidable array of both English and Viennese fortepianos played on this recording (see info below) provides listeners with a parallel journey, alongside through Dussek’s music, exploring the great tonal variety that existed amongst fortepianos in the composer’s day, with each instrument’s unique qualities matched to the differing characters of Dussek’s works.