Meyerbeer was a precocious composer and this album traces some of his very earliest works. Der Fischer und das Milchmädchen was his first stage work, a charming rural vignette that contains all the essential features of a ballet-divertissement couched in writing that enchantingly evokes the 18thcentury. Collaborating with his teacher, the Abbé Georg Vogler, Meyerbeer composed DerAdmiralin1811. The following year saw Wirt und Gast with the vivid Oriental exoticism of its Janissary music, while Romildae Constanza, his first Italian opera, shows his complete assimilation of Rossinian models.

REVIEWS:

Convincing performances of some delightful, largely unknown, scores.

I have had cause to praise the players of the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice on this website before...On this occasion their skilled sensitivity to the demands of the music is again well to the fore and they give us completely idiomatic accounts that are characterised, as appropriate, by delicacy or finely controlled energy. Several passages, especially in the earliest works, offer considerable opportunities for solo woodwind players and, whether from the flautist, oboist or clarinettist, those are invariably finely delivered. To employ a well-worn but nonetheless very useful cliché, all 34 musicians perform as real chamber players who are constantly listening intently to each other – as well as taking their musical lead from their conductor. Dario Salvi is, of course, something of a specialist explorer of the lesser-known byways of music composed in the second and third quarters of the 19th century and, by skilful control of orchestral colour, orchestral balance and dynamics he creates performances that could hardly, I think, be more idiomatic.

-- MusicWeb International