Florian Leopold Gassmann (1729-74) was a noted composer of Italian opera (principally) in Vienna, who enjoyed strong connections to the Royal court. He also was something of a schemer, as Dittersdorf relates in his autobiography, jealously guarding his position in the Austrian capital and using his control of the Royal theater to his best advantage. His music is about what you might expect from a Rococo composer: fluent, cheerful, and warmly melodic. All of these overtures contain three movements, fast-slow-fast, lasting no longer than eight minutes. They are thus miniature symphonies, and while the titles of the operas sound intriguing (The Critical Night; The Ridiculous Traveler; One Madman Makes Many; Love in the Workplace, etc), they are all cut from the same cloth and give little clue as to the contents of the drama to come.
This doesn’t make them any less pleasant, and some of these pieces enjoyed considerable popularity in their day. Indeed, Love in the Workplace was produced by Haydn at Eszterháza. The performances, by members of the National Symphony (Washington, DC), are highly accomplished, full of charm, and rhythmically perky. The conductor, Sylvia Alimena, plays second horn with the orchestra, and ensures that the wind parts don’t get buried by the strings. The engineering, though, is a touch dull on top, which gives the overall sound less sparkle than it might have had. Still, this disc constitutes an appealing program and a real slice of Viennese musical history that will be unfamiliar to most listeners. I recommend it accordingly.
