Carl Maria von Weber wrote music that has been admired by composers as diverse as Schumann, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky. But in his lifetime he was also recognised as one of the finest pianists of the period, with an exceptional technique and a brilliant gift for improvisation. Especially during the 1810s he toured extensively, and like other composer-pianists he wrote works to use as his personal calling cards, among them the two piano concertos recorded here. They were both composed in 1811-12, but while the First Concerto takes Mozart's concertos as its model, Piano Concerto No. 2 looks towards Beethoven.

Carl Maria von Weber wrote music that has been admired by composers as diverse as Schumann, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky. But in his lifetime he was also recognised as one of the finest pianists of the period, with an exceptional technique and a brilliant gift for improvisation.

The sixth disc in this highly acclaimed series combine two works in which Mozart's powers as an orchestrator come to the fore. Concerto No. 18 in B flat major, K 456, is sometimes referred to as one of the composers military concertos on the basis of the march-like main theme of the first movement. But more striking is the variety of ways that Mozart employs the various groups of instruments: strings, wind instruments and, of course, the piano. This aspect certainly didn't pass unnoticed by a listener as initiated as Mozart's father Leopold: in a letter to his daughter Nannerl he described how his enjoyment of the orchestral interplay had brought tears to his eyes.

The Kölner Akademie under its proven conductor Michael Willens now presents more atmospheric Christmas compositions by Francesco Durante, one of the greatest Neapolitan church composers of the first half of the eighteenth century. Durante continued the Neapolitan tradition of composing Christmas cantatas or motets, with a series of vocal works that he assigned to the category of the ‘Pastorale’ in order to indicate their relation to the Feast of Christmas and to the shepherds in the field.

Francesco Durante was one of the great Neapolitan church composers and teachers during the first half of the eighteenth century in Naples. He chose to focus on sacred music and his Magnificat in B flat major is doubtless the best known, most beloved, most performed, and most recorded work by him among the Neapolitan Christmas compositions on volume 1.

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was one of the most important figures of the Romantic movement, inspiring such later composers as Robert Schumann (Kreisleriana), Léo Delibes (Coppélia), Jacques Offenbach (The Tales of Hoffman), and Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky (Nutcracker) through his fantastic tales. Yet Hoffmann was a composer in his own right, and he had modest success with his operas Undine and Aurora, along with his Symphony in E flat major, and various vocal and chamber pieces. Hoffmann's symphony, the Overture to Undine, and the Overture and March from Aurora are programmed on this 2015 CPO release with the Symphony in A major by Friedrich Witt, a contemporary of Hoffmann who focused his energies almost entirely on instrumental music.

Anton Eberl is often referred to when discussing contemporaries of Beethoven and Mozart. He was one of Beethovens leading rivals in the field of instrumental music, but unfortunately most of his work has disappeared. Having studied with Mozart there was no other composer whose works were more frequently passed off a Mozarts than Anton Eberl. The Piano Concertos opp. 32 and 40 presented here are performed on a period pianoforte and follow the model of the solo concerto developed toward the end of the eighteenth century as realised exemplarily and individually in Mozarts Piano Concertos.

Composed in 1786, the Piano Concertos Nos 24 in C minor and 25 in C major are regarded as two of Mozart's finest achievements in the genre. Both are large-scale works, with durations of more than 25 minutes each – the C major concerto is in fact one of the most expansive of all classical piano concertos, rivalling Beethoven’s fifth concerto. Their grandeur immediately made them popular fare in the concert hall – Mendelssohn, for instance, had No.24 in his repertoire through the 1820s and 1830s – and new recordings appear regularly. It is nevertheless relatively rare to hear them performed on original instruments and with orchestral forces corresponding to what Mozart himself would have been familiar with.

We tend to think of Johann Mattheson (1681–1764) as a theorist first and foremost, and as a composer almost as an afterthought. To be sure, he competed in a world in Hamburg that at one time or another featured Reinhard Keiser, Georg Philipp Telemann, and George Frederick Handel; indeed, all of these were friends, sometimes rivals, and in one case, he and Handel even fought a duel over an opera, Cleopatra (Mattheson would have won, but a metal coat button deflected his sword, fortunately both for posterity and Handel). As a singer, he was well regarded, but by 1705 he had traded his performance chops for a real job as private secretary to the English ambassador. Although this was his day job, he also functioned as the cantor of the cathedral in Hamburg, for which he wrote a huge amount of sacred music that is only now becoming recognized alongside that of his colleague Telemann as pivotal works of the late Baroque.

Johann Mattheson gained lasting renown as a music writer with his two main works Die musikalische Ehrenpforte and Der vollkommene Kapellmeister, with the latter representing a foundational writing on cultural politics, musical aesthetics, and compositional practice in the first half of the eighteenth century. Mattheson was also himself a composer and experienced his most productive phase in this capacity during his years as cathedral music director at the Hamburg Cathedral (1715-28). He wrote twenty-four oratorios and other works for the cathedral music until increasing deafness forced him to resign from his post. That Mattheson is not at all known as a composer certainly has to do with the fact that a considerable portion of his compositional oeuvre was regarded as lost until 1998, when some works were rediscovered in a war evacuation depot in Erivan (Yerevan), Armenia. These works include Der liebreiche und geduldige David (The Loving and Patient David) of 1723, one of Mattheson’s last oratorios. It reveals him to us as a dramatically well-versed, highly imaginative musician who more than deserves his personal renaissance. cpo vows to take up his cause!