Track list:

Sérénade pour Guitare, Flûte er Alto Op.4 •
Sérénade pour Guitare, Flûte et Alto Op.10•
Sérénade pour Guitare, Flûte et Alto Op.15

The first album dedicated to a Bavarian contemporary of Schubert, featuring a trio
of easy-on-the-ear serenades in new recordings, played by an experienced Italian
ensemble with a track record of success in reviving forgotten corners of 19th-century
salon music. Joseph Küffner (1776-1856) trained as a lawyer but studied the guitar and violin in
his spare time. No ordinary ‘amateur’ musician, he performed concertos by Viotti
and Mestrino in public, and in due course became a teacher of those instruments,
then a regimental band leader; by the age of 30 he was a court musician for Archduke
Ferdinand. Two years later, in 1808, his own music was first published – a set of dances
for violin and guitar – but many of his surviving pieces remain in manuscript, including seven symphonies.

Most of Küffner’s music, however, was composed for his own instruments, and
tailored with an eye and ear to a lucrative domestic audience. Some 25 pieces are
scored for the combination of flute, viola and guitar heard on this new album, most
of them serenades, fantasies or pot-pourris, all unfailingly well-crafted and cheerful in
temperament. Having read through most of them, the Classico Terzetto Italiano has to
record three of the most delightful. Op.4 is, unusually, cast in a minor key, though
hardly tragic in mood. Op.10 is dedicated to the Grand Duke of Würzburg: a tribute from
one military man to another, and quoting a march from a then-popular opera,
Kreutzer’s Lodoïska. Op.15 includes a witty minuet and what sounds like a homage to
Mozart closing with a virtuosic Galop which tests the guitarist’s technique with its
brilliant figuration.