Franz Krommer (born in Moravia or Bohemia and also known as Frantisek Kramar) was a prolific Viennese composer who was younger than Haydn but older than Beethoven; his chamber works are well-crafted and elaborate, and when Beethoven came on the scene he regarded Krommer as a rival. He stopped worrying soon enough: there is nothing personal in Krommer's works, or even anything that reflects the revolutionary currents of the time. But his music was printed as far afield as America, and it still offers something for ...
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Franz Krommer (born in Moravia or Bohemia and also known as Frantisek Kramar) was a prolific Viennese composer who was younger than Haydn but older than Beethoven; his chamber works are well-crafted and elaborate, and when Beethoven came on the scene he regarded Krommer as a rival. He stopped worrying soon enough: there is nothing personal in Krommer's works, or even anything that reflects the revolutionary currents of the time. But his music was printed as far afield as America, and it still offers something for instrumentalists to dig into. This disc offers four octets that will test any wind ensemble with their unforgiving oboe and bassoon parts; they are all wind octets with ad lib doubling by a contrabass (or contrabassoon), despite the confusing designation in the booklet of the first one as a nonet. Though called partitas and billed in the booklet as outgrowths of the Feldparthie genre of the middle eighteenth century, they are not suite-like at all; they are all in the four standard...
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