Trained as a violinist, Andreas Romberg (1767-1821) began touring Europe at age 6 with his cousin Bernard who was a cellist. Well regarded during his lifetime, he took Haydn’s mature works as his model for his 30 string quartets. But as Beethoven became more popular, Romberg‘s reputation declined. That inverse relationship is dramatically revealed by the number of his public performances, which decreased in direct proportion to the string quartet performances of his more famous contemporary. All written in minor keys, the three quartets were composed at different times during his lifetime and follow the usual 4 movement pattern with the minuet as the 2nd section.

Born in Vechta in northwestern Germany, Andreas Romberg (1767-1821) began touring throughout Europe as a violinist at age 6 with his cousin Bernard. After working in orchestras in Bonn, Hamburg, Paris and Vienna, where he concertized with Beethoven, he succeeded Louis Spohr as the court music director for Duke August of Gotha, Thuringia. Well regarded during his lifetime, Romberg's decline can be traced directly to the ascendency of his more famous contemporary. Tracking the number of public performances of Beethoven's string quartets versus Romberg's reveals an inverse relationship.

Andreas Romberg numbers among music history’s forgotten composers. He was celebrated as a violin virtuoso and a composer, but this did not keep him from falling through the safety net into historiographical obscurity with its often-unjust judgments. We are recording his symphonies over time in the hope that he will receive more attention as a composer. Bonn, Hamburg, and Gotha were his career stations. In 1793, while still in Bonn, he wrote his Messiah, and in 1800 he also performed it in Hamburg, his new place of work. He without doubt regarded it as his favorite and main work, and over the years he repeatedly revised it. klassik-heute. com in April 2008: »Some marvelously atmospheric delights that do not fade away after a single hearing – of which I have been happy to convince myself in what so far have been three complete ‘sessions.’«

The music of Beethoven and his unfairly neglected contemporaries forms an important focus in the explorations of the faraway sound of the romantic era by the five instrumentalists of the Ardinghello Ensemble. Led by flautist Karl Kaiser, the ensemble presents the recording premiere of Andreas Romberg’s flute quintets – most highly individual compositions full of surprises on the threshold of romanticism.

Born in Lower Saxony just three years before Beethoven, the violinist Andreas Romberg (1767-1821) was, like him, a virtuoso instrumentalist of precocious gifts. His career too was radically affected by the Napoleonic Wars and a formative encounter with Haydn. And, as with Beethoven, his most popular work was a choral setting of a poem by Schiller: Das Lied von der Glocke, premiered in 1809. Romberg wrote an enormous number of violin concertos, but only sixteen manuscript scores of his entire oeuvre have survived, all of them in Hamburg. Chouchane Siranossian has decided to revive and make the world premiere recording of three concertos, thus revealing an interesting composer and a trio of highly virtuosic works.

Andreas Romberg is now more than an insiders tip; he is a recognized composer situated on the interface between Classicism and Romanticism. Romberg was regarded as a celebrated violin virtuoso, concertmaster, and composer, and his stays in Paris, Vienna, Prague, and Italy spread his fame internationally. He met Ludwig van Beethoven, Joseph Haydn, and many other musical personalities of his times. A great deal of his oeuvre covering all sorts of different genres was forgotten, but this is slowly changing, primarily owing to the Arbeitsstelle Andreas Romberg at the University of Vechta, a research center that since 1993 has engaged in the systematic investigation of this composers works.