In 1785, Antonin Reicha went to Bonn with his unchle Joseph to play flute in the court orchestra there. There he met Ludwig van Beethoven, ten months his junior. Soon they started a friendship that survived despite the long distance. Whilst Beethoven established himself in Vienna, Reicha achieved the highest acclaim in Paris as a composer and above all as a teacher. Cesar Franck, Hector Berlioz, Louise Farrenc and Friedrich von Flotow are only a few of his illustrious pupils who learned their trade with the help of Reicha's astute technical prowess. It is not easy to sum up what he achieved. He wrote dozens of wind quintets, string quartets, other works of chamber music, highly original piano works as well as four symphonies and several overtures. His experimentation most likely evoked "Homeric laughter" from his famous Viennese friend. And how could it be otherwise, when pieces such as the overture - which can be heard on the first CD of our complete symphonic recording - throw even modern sensibilities off balance with their constant disruptions of metre without one being able to say why one keeps losing count... Only repeated listening helps!
Reicha: Quintets For Solo Cello / Bylsma, L'archibudelli
Sony Masterworks
CD
$17.99Dec 16, 2009
There will be listeners who have come across the Paris string quartets in the so-called quatuor cancertant manner, that is to say with a soloistic firstviolin part that turns the work into something of a chamber concerto. This is something more unusual; a set of quintets in which a cello is the concertante instrument with a string quartet in attendance. Written in Paris in the middle of the first decade of the nineteenth century, the heyday of the quatuor concertant, they are typical of the ingenious Reicha in his use of the unexpected. He was a clever composer, as his pupils Berlioz and Liszt (among many other famous men) discovered to their benefit. These pieces find him in a more relaxed mode: no quirky fugues here. The minuets have been dropped, accentuating the chamber concerto manner; but the style is closer to the intimacies of chamber music without the intellectual subtleties of Haydn or Beethoven. They are really for cellists with a curiosity about the byways of their repertory; but others could enjoy this easy-going, undemanding music, nicely played by a group clearly out for enjoyment, and well recorded too.
The Serbian-American Paris-based pianist Ivan Ilic has signed a new multi-album recording contract with Chandos Records, following internationally acclaimed recordings of works by Godowsky and Feldman. His first project on the label is a series devoted to the solo piano works of the Czech composer Antoine Reicha, a contemporary and lifelong friend of Beethoven. Although best known for his contributions to the repertoire for wind quintet, Reicha wrote vast quantities of solo piano music, most of which has never been recorded. The manuscripts, preserved in the Bibliotheque nationale de France, were published only recently. Offering premiere recordings of the Grande Sonate in C major, the Sonata in F major, and three excerpts from Practische Beispiele, this first volume confirms Reicha as an authoritative, singular voice, whose piano works complement and enrich our understnanding of Haydn and Beethoven. Volume 1 is a coproduction of Chandos, RTS (Swiss Radio), and the Palazzetto Bru Zane- Centre de Musique Romantique Francaise in Venice.
The fruitful partnership between the Alpha label, the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel and the Palazzetto Bru Zane continues with this set of chamber music by Anton Reicha, performed by the musicians of the Chapel, young talents of an exceptionally high standard, ready and willing to take up the challenge of this music. A key figure of the early nineteenth century, this Czech composer who became a naturalised French citizen did not leave his contemporaries indifferent. Both his music and his theoretical writings set zealous partisans against fierce detractors. This three-part album, assembling pieces from different genres and periods, gives an insight into the richness of the composer’s extremely prolific output of chamber music, whose originality can still fascinate us nearly two centuries after his death: it illustrates the diversity of the instrumental genres he tackled (sonatas, fugues, études and variations for piano; piano trio, string quartet, string quintet) and a compositional art characterised at once by perfect mastery – as one would expect from someone trained by Haydn in Vienna between 1802 and 1808 – and by the greatest originality.
Following their critically acclaimed debut album, the Belfiato Quintet have gone back a century in time, to the "father of the wind quintet" Antonín Rejcha's life was adventurous and turbulent indeed. When he was 10, he ran away from his Prague home, and would live in turn in Bonn, Hamburg and Vienna, before finally settling in Paris. He presented his first symphony at the tender age of 17. Rejcha became a friend of Beethoven's, who played the viola in the same orchestra, he made the acquaintance with Haydn, and his teachers included Salieri. A keen experimenter, he liked to write in quintuple time, was fascinated by Gypsy music with micro-intervals, playing with numbers and chords, polyrhythm, polytonality and counterpoint. Moreover, he was an accomplished theorist and a renowned teacher, also working as a professor at the Conservatoire de Paris. His students included Liszt, Berlioz, Franck and other distinguished composers. Rejcha was the first to write truly masterful wind quintets, making full use of the instruments' timbres and technical potential. Notwithstanding it's being challenging to perform, his music comes across as bright, airy and gracious. The Belfiato Quintet selected three - the most beautiful and most engrossing - of Rejcha's 24 wind quintets, which they have recorded at the acoustically exceptionable Rudolfinum hall in Prague. It would seem that the virtuoso and passionate musicians have found in Rejcha a kindred spirit.
The Michael Thompson Wind Quintet, today known as The Michael Thompson Wind Ensemble, came into existence in 1992 when Barry Tuckwell announced that he was leaving the Wind Quintet that bore his name. The remaining instrumentalists unanimously turned to the finest horn soloist they knew to take his place, and Michael Thompson had no hesitation in accepting the invitation to head the illustrious group. The original Quintet, which brought together five of London's leading wind-players, was formed in 1969 and in the course of the next two decades performed in Russia, Australia, the Far East, Europe and the United States. The Ensemble today is of impeccable pedigree, each player a soloist in his own right. Michael Thompson himself is in great demand throughout the world as a teacher and, in addition to his post as horn professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London, has given master classes in the United States, Japan and Australia. As soloist/director he has recorded Mozart's complete works for horn and orchestra with the Bournemouth Sinfonietta.
For this his third volume of works by Antoine Reicha, the pianist Ivan Ilic turns to one of the composer’s most extraordinary works, L’Art de varier, Op. 57. ‘The Art of Variation’ consists of fifty-seven variations on a theme (that the number of variations match the opus number is not a coincidence) and was composed in 1802 – 03, at the beginning of the six-year period which Reicha spent in Vienna, where he studied with Haydn and re-kindled his previous friendship with Beethoven. The set is remarkable for its scale and invention. Ivan Ilic describes the work as the missing link between Bach’s ‘Goldberg’ Variations and Beethoven’s ‘Diabelli’ Variations, which was certainly influenced by Reicha’s work. The recording was made at Potton Hall in Suffolk, on a Steinway Model D grand piano.
REVIEW:
For almost 90 minutes [Reicha] subjects a simple, songful theme to the most kaleidoscopic imaginable treatment, and – thanks in part to the freshness and clarity of Ilić’s playing – the wonder is that I don’t get bored. The first variation is a demure little embroidery on the theme, and the second thunders in Beethovenian style. Then, after establishing these polarities, he’s off on a voyage full of drama and incident. Reicha’s invention never flags for a moment.
The young Thalia Ensemble erupted into the public spotlight with their being chosen as winners at the prestigious biennial York Early Music International Young Artists Competition. Their debut release spotlights the compositions of Antoine Reicha. Regarded as a pre-eminent composer for winds, Reicha , a flautist had an uncanny gift of melding the various wind instruments into a rich sonic tapestry in his compositions and the Thalia Ensemble’s inspired and dynamic playing proves to be a perfect match with the lively Wind Quintets.
REVIEWS:
The name Antoine Reicha is one which has fairly comprehensively slipped between the floorboards of musical history, except for within one select circle of musicians, wind players. With them Reicha's wind music, and in particular his wind quintets, has remained current and provides a useful and engaging program filler. The present CD brings us two wind quintets and an Adagio for wind quartet and obbligato cor anglais all played on period instruments of the early 19th century. This final detail may seem relatively unimportant in these days of the ubiquity of period performances, but in this case it was a major factor in my enjoyment of the CD. While tuneful and accessible, Reicha's music is occasionally accused of blandness, but when the Thalia Ensemble moved into the more chromatic passages of these works the music became imbued with considerable individuality. As a flute player himself, Reicha writes beautifully for the flute, but what is perhaps most striking is his mastery of the wind quintet as an entity - perhaps not since Mozart and not until Nielsen did anyone write such accomplished chamber music for winds. 5 stars.
– Early Music Review
These are infectious works, intended not to provoke but simply to delight, and in these elegantly shaped performances they do just that.
In 2023 the Bayerisches Staatsorchester is marking the five-hundredth anniversary of its formation with a series of releases by a number of its outstanding ensembles, all of which document the versatility of the orchestra and of its members. The second ensemble to be showcased by this series are the Munich Opera Horns representing the horn section from the Bayerische Staatsoper.
Ever since they were formed in 2007 the Munich Opera Horns have been keen to revive the tradition that lies behind their ensemble and to go beyond their involvement in opera performances and symphony concerts by developing new and equally valid forms of ensemble playing. They are now launching their debut album on the in-house label, Bayerische Staatsoper Recordings. Their title, Voyager, recalls a space probe and sets the tone for the recording as a whole inasmuch as it takes its listeners on a musical journey from the origins of their instrument to contemporary works for the modern valve horn. The Munich Opera Horns derive their sound from their awareness of their past, while continuing to develop the horn’s expressive potential. They perform not only works that were originally written for their family of instruments but also specially prepared arrangements of classics such as Richard Strauss’s Second Horn Concerto and a paraphrase of his opera Daphne. Furthermore they also present entirely new works that have been composed especially for them. This ensemble is setting new standards with its astonishing virtuosity and delicate sonorities.
This concert recording from Mozart Week 2024 focuses on Wolfgang Amade Mozart's and Anton Reicha's horn quintets, two major works of a genre that has been very rarely cultivated throughout music history. After the Prague-born composer, music theorist and pedagogue Anton Reicha had already briefly tried his luck in Paris in 1799, he finally settled in the French metropolis in 1808. The Horn Quintet in E major op. 106 is one of his last compositions. It is juxtaposed with Mozart's Rondo and the Horn Quintet. The Baborak Ensemble played at this year's Mozart Week in Salzburg, where this recording was made.
A famous Beethoven work and a Reicha premiere in the hands of exceptional performers. Just like the well-known drama of Beethoven's life, the biography of Anton Reicha would also make an exciting film, but this recording mainly shows us the friendship of the two great composers at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. They were born the same year, and from their first encounter as 15-year-olds in the Bonn court orchestra, they became close friends. They studied together at the university in Bonn, and they both became friends of Haydn. Their music also shared similarities mainly during Reicha's period in Vienna. It was while Reicha was in Vienna that he wrote his only piano concerto and that Beethoven wrote his fifth and most famous work in the genre. Both concertos are in the "heroic" key of E flat major. While Beethoven's "Emperor Concerto" is a mainstay of the piano literature, this is the first complete recording of Reicha's concerto. Missing pages from the solo part were first discovered in 2018. Jan Bartos is a highly acclaimed interpreter of Beethoven, and here he is following in the tradition of his teachers Ivan Moravec and Alfred Brendl. The wonderful playing of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, which has Beethoven's blood in it's veins, gives the live recording from the Prague Spring Festival the hallmark of authenticity. Playing the meticulously detailed accompaniment in the studio recording of Reicha's concerto is the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra. Bartos's partner at the helm of both orchestras is Petr Popelka, today undisputedly a world-class conductor who has the rare ability to breathe meaning and life into every note. The friends Beethoven and Reicha are symbolically reunited after more than two centuries on a single album in special musical company.
Ludwig van Beethoven took his first musical steps in the chapel of the prince-bishop's court in Bonn. With the "Edition Hofkapelle", the Beethoven Orchestra Bonn is searching for traces. The first series of Harmoniemusik reveals something astonishing: Beethoven was never again as operatic as he was in Bonn, inspired by a musical environment that appreciated musical entertainment at the highest level. "Richard the Lionheart" was on everyone's lips and ears in Beethoven's Bonn time; the master himself composed a cycle of piano variations on Grétry's catchy melodies. It is not unlikely that he also knew Franz Ehrenfried's harmony music on the popular opera, which the wind players of the Beethoven Orchestra Bonn present here with a delight in the theatrical - from Blondel's soulful romance "Une fièvre brûlante" to the spirited drinking song about the Sultan Saladin. The Hofkapelle approaches Beethoven's Octet with equal verve, which, despite the misleading opus number 103, can be located in his Bonn period. Beethoven is seldom heard in such a lively and animated manner - associations from Mozart's "Abduction" to Rossini's "Barber" come to mind. The "Rondino" is given a particularly distinctive color by the impressively virtuoso use of natural horns, which Beethoven knows how to enhance even further by playing with mutes. As orchestra director, Joseph Reicha must have had a special influence on the young Beethoven; this may be evident from both sextets. With Lorenzo Coppola as coach, the Beethoven Orchestra Bonn has brought in a real specialist for wind music of the classical period, and the fact that with the rococo festival hall of the Redoute, an almost originally preserved performance venue can be experienced on this album and the three-dimensional sound rounds off this unusual production beautifully.
Echoes of Bohemia - 20th-Century Czech Music for Winds / Orsino Ensemble
Chandos
SACD
$10.99$21.99Save 50%Sep 01, 2023
Following their début album, Belle Époque, the Orsino Ensemble turns its attention to music from Bohemia. There is a strong tradition of Czech wind playing, and hence a wealth of great repertoire on which to draw.
Antoine Reicha was a contemporary (and friend) of Beethoven. His E flat Quintet, published in 1817, demonstrates his harmonic ingenuity and talent for idiomatic instrumental writing. Mládí, described by Janácek as ‘…a sort of memoir of youth’, was composed in 1924 in celebration of the composer’s own seventieth birthday, and the mood of the piece is optimistic throughout.
Born in Brno, Pavel Haas studied at the city’s conservatory, under Janácek – indeed Haas is widely considered to be Janácek’s greatest pupil. Composed in 1929, the Wind Quintet typifies his quirky musical imagination and affinity for instrumental timbre.
Bohuslav Martinu came from the small town of Policka, on the Czech-Moravian border, but received his early musical education in Prague, where he also played second violin in the Czech Philharmonic. A government scholarship enabled him to move to Paris in the early 1920s to study with Roussel. Martinu immersed himself in Parisian musical life, the works of Stravinsky and the Jazz scene proving two considerable influences on his own compositions. His Sextet for Wind and Piano is considered one of his most successful Jazz-inspired pieces and, although an early work, demonstrates the natural melodic style so typical of his later works.
REVIEW:
Reicha’s Quintet pairs different combinations of instruments together with delightful felicity, and the bubbly horn writing is a constant delight. It’s a well-paced reading, too, coming in at 28 minutes. The Orsino Ensemble’s performance of Janáček’s Mládi is crisp and tight and I especially appreciated Walker’s pipy and lithe piccolo playing.
The church acoustic has been well judged and there’s no sense of billowy or unfocused sound, rather a warm, uncloying well-cushioned directness. There isn’t – or, at least, I’ve not been able to find – an exact competitor to this disc so the excellence of the performances stands in the Chandos team’s favor as does the adventurous repertoire. Carping critics like me may suggest alternatives in individual works but overall this is a highly effective disc.
Demersseman, Moscheles, Reicha & Schreck: Romantic Music for
Brilliant Classics
CD
$11.99$14.99Save 20%Apr 18, 2025
- An original and highly enjoyable program of works for bassoon and piano by romantic composers: the bassoon sonata Op. 9 by Gustav Schreck (1849-1918), the bassoon sonata by Anton Reicha (1770-1836), the Grande Sonate by Ignaz Moscheles (1794-1870) and the brilliant Introduction & Polonaise by Jules Demersseman (1833-1866). - Strongly melodious music of great beauty, a valuable homage to that neglected but highly expressive and versatile wind instrument, the bassoon! - Played by Paolo Carlini, bassoon and Fabrizio Datteri, piano. Paolo Carlini is one of the foremost bassoon players of his generation, he recorded extensively as a soloist for labels Sony Classical, CPO, CHANDOS, Brilliant Classics, Stradivarius, Naxos, Tactus, EMA Records.
The piano works of the Czech-born composer Antoine Recha - friend of Haydn and Beethoven, teacher of Berlioz, Liszt and Franck - are one of hte best-kept secrets in music. He was an important influence on composers of the next generation but, apart from an innovative set of fugues, his piano works have remained almost unknown since his own day. Encompassing Baroque practices as well as looking forward to the twentieth century, they are full o fharmonic and other surprises that show this liveliest of minds at work. The massive variation-set on a simple French gavotte recorded here for the first time reveals a composer who tempers his learning with a vivid sense of humor. Henrik Lowenmark is the world authority on the piano music of Reicha. He was born in Gothenburg and educated at the university there but has long since lived in Stockholm. Since his graduation he has been active as freelance musician in a multitude of contexts: solo, chamber, accompaniment and song-coaching. In 2006, he finished his master's thesis, The Piano Music of Anton Reicha, at the University of Gothenburg.
The Czech-born composer Anton Reicha (1770–1836) was an exact contemporary of Beethoven, and his close friend from their mid-teens. The music of each man demonstrates an awareness of what the other was doing: they showed each other their compositions-in-progress. But although Reicha was closely associated with one of the best-known names in western culture, his own music has been grievously neglected: only his woodwind quintets have achieved any currency. Of his vast cycle of almost forty string quartets just one had been recorded before – an omission this ambitious project intends to put right, thereby revealing one of the most inventive and engaging spirits in classical music. - Toccata Classics
