John Wummer in music by Frederick the Great and Quantz

A pleasant little Westminster album on display here. Flute legend John Wummer is paired with noted harpsichordist Fernando Valenti in sonatas by Frederick the Great and his Potsdam court musician, Johann Joachim Quantz.

This is uncomplicated, lyrical music easy on the ear and not excessively demanding for all parties involved. Frederick the Great, a great musical connoisseur, had very firm and definite ideas about music, the most important being that music's primary purpose is to entertain both the musician and the audience. Quantz provided scores of these short sonatas to his king and they are all characterized by flowing melodies and logical, easy harmonies. Frederick delighted in these works and used them as models for his own, quite accomplished, compositions.

Wummer was an excellent musician and his playing is beautifully pure and phrasing is elegant. This is aristocratic playing, clean proper. Valenti provides instinctive accompaniment, tasteful and properly deferential.

This record is just what the doctor ordered when you need beauty without the complications of life.


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Symphonies by Frederick the Great

Frederick II of Prussia was a true renaissance man. As a stateman and soldier, he laid the foundations for Prussia's rise as the dominant German state which would, less then 100 years after is death, unify Germany into a mighty empire. As a man of learning, he encouraged and fostered philosophical dialogue, most notably with Voltaire, led great architectural projects that built his capital into a European showplace and, he actively supported the great musicians and writers of his time in performance and composition. Surely, it is no wonder why Frederick became known as the "Great."

Frederick, himself, was a talented musician, played the flute on what would appear a near professional level, and he dabbled extensively in composition, especially in his younger years. Here, we have four examples of his symphonies, works that are tuneful, structured accordingly to the methods of the times, and comparable to what comtemporaries were writing throughout the continent. These works are typical of Frederick's views on music: they have sunshine and little darkness and require no analysis or deep thought. Music, for Frederick, was a pleasurable experience, a diversion from the cares of the day, in sort, not at all a philosophical or biographical experience. In fact, much that was written at his court has pretty much faded for that reason; it is not all that memorable. Though the great CPE Bach was a fixture of Frederick's court for a number of years, most of the corpus of his writing lends itself from the Hamburg years, not from Berlin and Potsdam. In Hamburg, the free city allotted a composer greater freedom of "thought" then a royal court.

For some reason, these late 70's recordings never appeared on cd. Its too bad because they are worthy if taken as they are and, they are a great historical reminder of an extraordinary royal person.

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