Johann Baptist Vanhal: Symphony in E minor, Bryan e2, Camerata Schweiz

Johann Baptist Vanhal (Jan Křtitel Vaňhal) - Symphony in E minor, Bryan e2 (1771 — 1773), Camerata Schweiz, Howard Griffiths (conductor)
I. Allegro moderato – 00:00
II. Cantabile – 06:38
III. Menuetto ma un poco allegretto – 10:55
IV. Allegro – 14:48

„Johann Baptist Vanhal (12 May 1739 – 20 August 1813) was an important Czech classical music composer (other forms of his name: Křtitel, Jan Ignatius; Vanhal, Wanhal, Vanhall, Wanhall, van Hal) He numbers among the most productive composers of the eighteenth century.
According to the current count, he composed at least seventy-seven symphonies, some sixty solo concertos, several hundred works for chamber ensembles and just as many works for piano, and in the category of liturgical music fifty-one masses and many more than a hundred shorter sacred vocal works. According to the Vanhal scholar Paul Bryan's tentative estimate, the total number of his works is to be reckoned at 1,377. If one can believe what early witnesses stated about the extent of his overall oeuvre, then some works exceeding this number must have been lost.
The lexicographer Gottfried Johann Dlabacz (who knew Vanhal personally), for example, spoke of the existence of a hundred symphonies in his Künstler-Lexikon für Böhmen published in 1815. But Vanhal quite early made a name for himself not only with the overwhelming quantity of his works but also with their quality. Already in 1772, when Vanhal was thirty-three years old, the English music historian Charles Burney noted in his travel journal during his trip throughout Europe that he would not hesitate to name Vanhal's symphonies „among the most complete and perfect compositions, for many instruments, which the art of music can boast”. In a later publication (1819) Burney even declared, „till we were acquainted with the symphonies of Haydn, the spirited, natural, and unaffected style of Vanhall excited more attention at our [i.e., London] concerts than any foreign music we had imported for a long time”.
Already in 1925 the musicologist Robert Sondheimer declared that Vanhal had worked out his own approach to the genre of the symphony and had done so completely independently of the development in Joseph Haydn - a finding confirmed by a glance at the Symphony in E minor (Bryan e 2). The symphony was presumably part of a series of six symphonies whose date of composition is to be assigned to the period during 1771-73. Four symphonies from this series, including e 2, appeared in print in Paris in 1775 as Vanhal's op. 18. The difference from Haydn is apparent not so very much in the formal design of the movements as instead in Vanhal's method for setting forth and treating the themes." (From Album Notes by Bert Hagels)