Luigi Boccherini hovers somewhere between Haydn and Beethoven in the catalogue of classical composers and often tends to be forgotten between those two titans.
Born in Italy, he quickly made his name as a virtuoso cellist and when he was 26 he was made court chamber music composer to the Infanta Don Luis in Madrid, where he was to spend the next 20 years, which may explain why he is sometimes overlooked. But when you see his musical output as a composer it’s hard to explain. He wrote 91 string quartets (Haydn only 84), 20 symphonies, 137 quintets for various combinations of instruments, sextets, octets and a whole host of other works. It’s his less well-known works for flute that Dr Sally Walker presents on this brilliant 2CD set together with eight Australian colleagues drawn from various orchestras and musical groups. The first CD presents the six quintets of his Opus 19 written in 1771 after he’d been in Madrid for two years. They are all both lively and gracious. CD2 has a sextet from the end of his time in Spain and a quintet which in all probability wasn’t actually written by him at all, but is nevertheless attributed to him. I didn’t find these two as appealing as the early quartets. Why Boccherini the cellist should have written 18 works especially for the flute while in Spain is anybody’s guess (it’s been suggested that there might have been a virtuoso flautist passing through at the time), one can only be thankful that he did and that Sally Walker and her colleagues have seen fit to record the less well-known ones.
2MBS subscribers have the chance to win a copy of Boccherini.
Listen to Fine Music Drive, Monday to Friday (4pm- 7pm) to hear tracks from the album.
–Michael Morton-Evans