Georg Joseph Vogler (1749-1814)
Overture to “Gustaf Adolph och Ebba Brahe” (1786/87)
Symphony in C major “Scala” (c. 1800)
Overture to “Samori” (1802/03)
Overture to “Castor und Pollux” (c. 1786)
Overture to “Die Kreutzfahrer” (1802)
Overture to “Der Kaufmann von Smyrna” (1771)
Munich Radio Orchestra/Howard Griffiths
rec. 2022, Studio 1, Bayerischen Rundfunks, Munich
cpo 555 373-2 [57]
Georg Joseph Vogler was apparently something of a gadfly, constantly on the move and creating an extensive CV as a composer, pianist, organist and educator, collecting titles and honours on the way. He seems to have gained as many fans as he did opponents, who “thought of him as a presumptuous charlatan.” Crusty old reviewers such as me rub their hands with glee at such discoveries, and there is indeed plenty to delight and intrigue with this recording.
Vogler’s music on this disc has a refreshingly open character that at first seems inoffensive, and the kind of thing you can have on as background music without driving customers out of your restaurant or shop. There is a skilfully playful eccentricity at work here however, and there are some corners that almost made me laugh out loud. The opening overture is to an opera, Gustaf Adolph och Ebba Brahe, commissioned by King Gustav III of Sweden. This is a three-part sinfonia with some distinctive themes and a general sense that the opera will be an enjoyable experience. I particularly like the pastoral central section, which seems to take a leaf or two out of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony but precedes it by around three decades.
The Symphony in C major was Vogler’s third and last in this genre, and a work that one critic summed up as having “the rare advantage that it unites what is so difficult to bring together: the unusual with the natural, erudition with charm and mirth.” Composed in four movements and relatively compact at around 20 minutes, this was a popular work in its day but was considered old-fashioned by the mid-19th century. Fun elements include scales that chase each other in the first movement, and there is a ‘Bavaria motif’ that you can listen out for throughout the whole work. The second movement is a sweetly gentle set of variations on a Christmas song, Resonet in laudibus, followed by a quirky minuet with a sense of humour that descends directly from Haydn. The name “Scala’ comes from the final movement, which appears to be a response to Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony in its contrapuntal nature, a scale of C major being one of the main thematic elements. Vogler may have some serious intent, but the jovial nature of this music punctures any academic pretensions, sliding around all over the place and full of light flourishes that keep us looking in all directions at once and ends with fabulous abruptness.
The remaining tracks are mostly overtures in a similar tripartite model to Gustaf Adolph, combining this tried and tested convention with ‘modern’ elements. Samori has some surprising harmonic twists and plenty of contrasts in orchestration, while Castor und Pollux takes on a military character with some moments descriptive of a battle in the form of fanfares and string turbulence, contrasting with a funereal slow march. The overture to Die Kreutzfahrer is from music written for a play by August von Kotzebue and is great fun, having descriptions of conflict between crusaders and Orientals that integrate dissonances and pentatonic scales to generate an exotic feel that goes beyond more familiar Turkish percussion effects heard from Mozart and Haydn. The brief overture to Der Kaufmann von Smyrna was written for a one-act singspiel, and as an earlier work is filled with popular Mannheim stylistic traits such as those famous crescendos. I would personally have ended the programme with the more spectacular Die Kreutzfahrer, but it’s a nice bonus with some tricky virtuoso horn writing.
In all this is a well recorded and superbly performed programme from a composer of which few of us will have been aware until now. There are some moments where it is hard for modern ears not to compare Vogler with P.D.Q. Bach, but this aspect merely serves to point out the sense of enjoyment and sheer fun that can be had with this recording. Applause goes to the cpo label for giving us yet another out of the ordinary release, and if you are up for some new music from that neglected period between ‘Classical’ and ‘Romantic’ then Georg Joseph Vogler has plenty to offer.
Dominy Clements
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