Wilms was the most important composer in the Amsterdam music world during the first half of the 19th century, but only few of his Symphonies are available on CD. Born in Germany two years after Beethoven, he was influenced by the works of Haydn and Mozart.
Critically acclaimed Radio Chamber Orchestra (40 piece) toured worldwide and is well known for interpretations of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, but also of modern compositions. Anthony Halstead, born in Manchester (UK), conducted a.o. the Bach programme at BBC Proms.

So, Gatti: Here are three delightful Classical concertos, in period-instrument performances, made live in Mantua and Milan. The scores have been dusted off and freshly edited, and reveal a musical voice not circumscribed by time or place: he adjusted to the new, more complex, post-Classical style led by Hummel in the decades after Mozart's death, as the Piano Concerto shows.

Another recording by the Nepomuk Fortepiano Quintet, who's previous recordings, received much praise from the specialist press.In this recording the ensemble focuses on the "Schubert setting" including the double bass, and on content that deserves further exploration.

In recent years there have been a number of recordings with music by Giacomo Carissimi. Many of these feature his oratorios which gave the composer his fame in his own time and in modern times also. There are recordings of his best-known oratorios, like Jephte, Ionas, Job.

Woelfl is one of the composers who still, like numerous other contemporaries of Mozart and Beethoven, suffers unspeakable slander today; a slander that could probably only be borne out of sheer ignorance and uninformed prejudice.
His prodigious talent at the keyboard could very likely have inspired the young Beethoven to hone his extraordinary pianistic skill even further; as from the fateful Viennese duel of 1798.
His spirit of aristocratic elegance and classical poise as inherited from the hands of Mozart is something that Beethoven could perhaps, only admire from a distance.

Although little known today, during his lifetime Johann Gottlieb Naumann (1741–1801) occupied a very respected niche in the world of late 18th-century music. Born and raised near Dresden, his career was largely made there; after moving to northern Italy in 1757 for further musical training (his teachers there included Padre Martini), he was called to the Saxon imperial court in 1764 on the recommendation of Johann Adolf Hasse as second church composer, attaining promotion to Kapellmeister in 1776. Between 1777 and 1786 he was also active as a musical reformer of opera along Italian lines in Stockholm and Copenhagen; to retain him in Dresden, the Saxon elector promoted Naumann to Oberkapellmeister in 1786. Naumann remained there for the rest of his life, dying a wealthy and respected man. (For further details see Brian Robins’s review of the composer’s oratorio Betulia liberata in Fanfare 30:2.)

Ces Trios, dont voici le premier enregistrement dans leur version pour cors de basset, proviennent du prodigieux ensemble que Haydn écrivit à l’intention du prince Nicolas Esterházy, joueur passionné de baryton à cordes.

Jan Dismas Zelenka's music for the funeral rites of Augustus the Strong - Officium defunctorum ZWV 47 (Invitatorium, Nocturno I-III) and Requiem ZWV 46 - reveals the most impressive face of the Baroque theatre of death.

Celebrating the rediscovery of a long-lost mass in forty parts - a feast of Renaissance choral music from Italy and England, the album (and bonus DVD) reveals a work by the Italian, Alessandro Striggio – believed lost until the recent discovery of vocal parts, in Paris. Striggio travelled extensively to the courts of Europe and it was probably a performance during his visit to Elizabethan England in 1567 that inspired Tallis to write "Spem in alium", which is performed here with rarely heard instrumental accompaniment and the benefit of a major piece of textual change reinforcing the message of forgiveness.

The fifth volume in a very compelling series covering the huge flowering of composing talent that originated in Bohemia in the period preceding and contemporaneous to Haydn and Mozart.These composers laid the groundwork for the masterpieces of the classical era.

A Musical clock is a clock that marks the hours of the day with a musical tune played from a spiked cylinder either on bells, organ pipes, bellows, combs and even dulcimer strings. The earliest ones began in mainly churches and would be used to mark times for the public and for farmers in fields to tell them when it was sunset dawn and lunchtime.

The title of this album comes from the fact that Haydn wrote most of these insertion arias (arias written to show off the special talents of a singer in a particular production, and substituted for the arias by the opera's composer) for his lover, Italian soprano Luigia Polzelli.

On this 2009 CD, the scholar-pianist Paul Badura-Skoda (b. 1927) offers an inspired performance of Haydn's keyboard music. Badura-Skoda plays his own rare fortepiano dating from around 1790 built by a maker, Johann Schantz, whom Haydn praised highly. The instrument has a lighter, clearer tone than the contemporary piano. It is bell-like and somewhat dry with a detached sound. In these performances, Badura-Skoda plays with a light, quick touch with sparing use of the pedal and less emphasis on legato playing than would be offered in more contemporary readings. He also plays with a great deal of musicality and passion.

One of the Czech composers to progress from baroque style to that of preclassicism, Brixi is now credited with preparing Prague for the subsequent arrival of Mozart whose operas and symphonies were to be performed there with such success.

Chronological treatments of the early part of Mozart's career have mostly focused on his tours as a child prodigy, his eventful trip to Paris and back, and his rebel years in Salzburg. The two years he spent in Italy in his early teens, traveling and studying with counterpoint teacher Padre Martini, get overlooked. Yet this was the period in which Mozart became Mozart, in which, to use computer parlance, the "defaults" for much of his structural thinking were set in place.