Ear-tickling Hummel unearthed

Last month’s One To Watch comes good in this lovely disc of Hummel rarities. Christopher Hinterhuber is terrific in these works, and seems to be fast becoming a Naxos favourite. That label also works its old and much-appreciated trick of unearthing a really excellent but little-hyped band in the Gävle Symphony Orchestra of Sweden.

-- Gramophone [2/2008]

The four concertante pieces on this imaginative disc were written between 1820 and 1833, primarily as vehicles to show off Hummel's virtuosity at the keyboard. He wrote The Return to London in celebration of his return to the capital after 40 years - and the visit was a triumph. The jaunty main rondo theme prompts a sequence of free variations punctuated by improvisatory passages.

The Variations and Finale offers a similar free formula, again with a breezy main theme, while Oberons Zauberhorn ("Oberon's Magic Horn") uses material from Weber's opera which was being performed at the time. Surprisingly little of Weber's material is involved but it makes a colorful piece with a strikingly dramatic opening and with a storm sequence full of tremolos and horn fanfares. The Variations in F date from 1820, a simpler set, well varied, with a cadenza near the end and an emphatic close.

Christoper Hinterhuber, who has already recorded piano music by CPE Bach for Naxos, is a first-rate soloist, accompanied by the Gävle Symphony Orchestra, one of the oldest in Sweden, under its German music director Uwe Grodd. An excellent disc of long-buried rarities, well-worth hearing.

--Review by Edward Greenfield, Gramophone, February 2008