Budapest Failoni Chamber Orchestra, Uwe Grodd

• Dittersdorf: Sinfonia in A major, Grave A10, "Sinfonia nazionale nel gusto di 5 nazioni" (Flavor of 5 Nations)
• Dittersdorf: Sinfonia in A minor, Grave a2, "Il delirio delli compositori" (The Delirium of Composers)
• Dittersdorf: Sinfonia in D major, Grave D16, "Il combattimento delle passioni umani" (Battle of Human Passions)

Unlike the famous symphonies based on Ovid's Metamorphoses, the works on this disc are not programmatic in a narrative sense so much as descriptive, and, in the case of the Sinfonia 'Il deliria delli compositori, ossia Il gusto d'oggidì' and the Sinjonia nazionale nel gusto di cinque nazioni, less descriptive than satirical. The Sinfonia 'Il delirio delli compositori, assia Il gusto d'oggidì' was advertised for sale in Supplement XIII (1779-80) of the Breitkopf Catalogue and was probably written several years earlier. In the late 1760s and early 1770s a number of composers, Dittersdorf among them, wrote dark, troubled minor-key symphonies of quite extraordinary depth and power. In Haydn's case, his patron, Prince Nicholas Esterházy, took active steps to warn Haydn off this line of development perhaps sensing in this revolutionary music the whiff of sedition. Knowing Haydn's 'Sturm und Drang' symphonies and virtually nothing by any of his major contemporaries, some nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century biographers attributed this style of composition to a great romantic crisis in the composer's life. If that were the case, then research in recent years has established beyond a shadow of a doubt that Vanhal, Dittersdorf, Mozart, Beck and even the genial Johann Christian Bach all suffered similar crises in the space of a decade. We now know, as Dittersdorl surely did, that this was fashion not mass hysteria and wherever fashion leads satire is sure to follow.

December 1998