Meyerbeer: Music for Festive Occasions

Giacomo Meyerbeer is nowadays one of the great known unknowns. You know the names of some of his operas - you hardly ever hear the operas themselves. With his other works it looks even worse. A case for cpo! We have now taken up his orchestral music. Even if it is very straightforward, Meyerbeer handled the orchestra with great virtuosity, and it is no coincidence that Berlioz quoted many examples of his instrumentation theory from Meyerbeer's scores Almost all of the orchestral works are representative commissioned compositions, after all, Meyerbeer was probably the most famous composer of his time. In 1862 the committee of the London World Exhibition chose him to write the German contribution to the festival This is how the large-scale overture in marching style was created. In 1859, when the centenary of the birth of Friedrich Schiller was celebrated in Paris with great pomp, Meyerbeer's Schiller March was heard to accompany it The Prussian court was also very interested in moving the son of the city, who had been honoured in Paris, to Berlin: in 1842 he became General Music Director here. One of his first tasks was the composition of a torch dance for the wedding of Princess Marie Friederike with Crown Prince Maximilian of Bavaria. This was so successful that Meyerbeer wrote three more torch dances for other weddings in the next few years We have now produced all of these works again, and you can look forward to one of the most brilliant (and snappiest!) CDs from our company It is performed by the Radio-Philharmonie Hannover of the NDR under Michail Jurowski.