Ries: Concert Overtures

With this highly enjoyable disc of concert overtures, beautifully performed and captured in excellent sound, CPO continue their important survey of the orchestral music of Ferdinand Ries. From their first release of his third and fifth symphonies, this has been a real voyage of discovery, revealing a composer of significant talent and imagination who continued to develop artistically across his career and embraced the changes of the developing Early Romantic period. Most of the works set down here are from later in Ries' career, some products of his involvement in the music festivals of the Rhineland after he had returned to Germany from London; only one of them has the air of an occasional piece, the celebratory `Große Festouvertüre und Siegesmarsch' of 1832 the development section of which segues neatly into a ceremonial march, replete with "Janissary" sound effects, instead of a conventional sonata form recapitulation; the others reflect the Romantic concept of a single movement orchestral piece inspired by literature or a more loose poetical conceit.