Home listening - step up, Franz Clement and Henry Litolff

The Guardian 0

These two overlooked composers are well served by two new recordings. And 20 glorious years of Radio 3’s New Generation Artists

• We’re going to hear a great deal of Beethoven this year, the 250th anniversary of his birth, but what of the music that shaped and influenced him, so much of it forgotten today? The German conductor Reinhard Goebel aims to enlighten us in a new Sony Classical series entitled Beethoven’s World.

It begins with a first-rate recording of Violin Concertos Nos 1 and 2 by Franz Joseph Clement (1780-1842). This virtuoso gave the 1805 premiere of his own first violin concerto in D major in the same concert that his friend Beethoven’s Symphony No 3 “Eroica” was unleashed on a wary world. Clement’s concerto received a warmer reception than Beethoven’s symphony, but that didn’t stop Beethoven writing his own now far more famous Op 61 Violin Concerto in D major for Clement the following year, and dedicating it to him. This in turn inspired Clement to write his second violin concerto, in D minor, recorded here for the first time.