Music for a Prussian Salon

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World-premiere recordings of music by Tausch, Crusell, Baermann, Stamitz

Music for a Prussian Salon illustrates the musical legacy of the influential but now-forgotten clarinettist Franz Tausch (1762–1817). Tausch’s extraordinary career stretched from his training as a child prodigy at the heart of the Mannheim court through to post-Napoleonic Berlin, where he trained some of the most famous wind-players of the early-Romantic period. His life and music encapsulate the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in a unique and fascinating way.

Tausch’s exquisitely intimate 13 Pièces en Quatuor comprise a lexicon of compositional style during his lifetime. Music for a Prussian Salon places them alongside works by Mannheim School founder Johann Stamitz and two of Tausch’s most famous clarinet pupils, Heinrich Baermann and Bernhard Henrik Crusell. The colours of historical clarinets, horns and bassoon create a rich sound-world in repertoire that charts the development of instrumental technique from the simplicity of Stamitz’s Quartets to the virtuoso excesses of Crusell’s operatic Concert-Trio. Baermann’s much-loved Adagio is heard in a new version made specially for the ensemble – a 21st-century creation, yet one that reflects the historical tradition of harmonie-arrangement.

Emily Worthington and Fiona Mitchell, classical clarinets
Anneke Scott and Kate Goldsmith, natural horns
Robert Percival, classical bassoon