"An army of generals, equally fit to plan a battle as to fight one" was how musical diarist and traveller Dr. Charles Burney described the Mannheim Court Orchestra in 1773. It would be hard, though, to imagine the Mannheim orchestra delivering performances to match these mercurial offerings from Concerto Köln. Best known among these works is the C major cello concerto by Carl Stamitz, elegantly played here by Werner Matzke. There's just one bargain disc in the catalogs devoted to Stamitz cello concertos--from Christian Benda and the Prague Chamber Orchestra on Naxos--but it omits this C major work, arguably the best of the set. Matzke plays with rather more polish and verve, however, in his finely articulated, period-sensitive reading.

Anton Fils' little G minor symphony, heard here in a brisk, urgent reading, is otherwise unavailable on disc, and the same goes for the three-movement Sinfonia No. 5 by Ingaz Fränzl, a composer whose violin playing was praised by Mozart. But the most powerful and dynamic among these Mannheim works is Christian Cannabich's E-flat symphony. Cannabich's symphonies--or some of them at least--are finding new outlets in Naxos' "The 18th Century Symphony" series, and hopefully will also be represented in Chandos' "Contemporaries of Mozart" edition from Mathias Bamert and the London Mozart Players. Naxos hasn't yet featured this particular work, however, and this exceptionally vivid, brilliantly recorded account will be hard to beat. In all, this disc offers a valuable retrospective on one of the richest yet least acknowledged periods of musical history.

--Michael Jameson