Hummel: Oberon’s Magic Horn, Etc

“The four concertante pieces on this imaginative disc were written between 1820 and 1833, primarily as vehicles to show off Hummel's virtuosity as the keyboard. Christopher Hinterhuber, who has already recorded piano music by CPE Bach for Naxos, is a first-rate soloist, accompanied by the Gävle Symphony Orchestra, one of the oldest in Sweden... An excellent disc of long-buried rarities, well worth hearing.” --Gramophone Magazine, February 2008

Gramophone Magazine Editor's Choice - February 2008

Hummel’s long career as one of Europe’s most celebrated virtuosi owed as much to his resourcefulness as a composer as it did to his exceptional technique as a pianist. The four works on this recording illustrate the vitality of Hummel’s musical imagination at the height of his career. Oberons Zauberhorn (Oberon’s Magic Horn) is a strikingly original fantasy based loosely on Weber’s opera Oberon. Le retour de Londres, a large-scale rondo composed in 1833, opens with a slow introduction remarkable for its beauty and expressive power which leads into the inventive and brilliantly virtuosic Rondeau.

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