CD review: Franz Danzi, Music for Piano and Winds

Pearson, I. E. (2018) CD review: Franz Danzi, Music for Piano and Winds. Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 15 (3) pp. 1-3. ISSN 1479-4098 (print), 2044-8414 (online)

Abstract

Founded in the spring of 2009, the British chamber group Ensemble f2 ‘play[s] music we love and want to do … on the instruments which seem to suit the repertoire best’. Since beginning their Discover Danzi project in 2013, to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of Franz Danzi (1763–1826), Ensemble f2 has recorded two CDs of wind chamber music on period instruments. The recordings were made at the world-famous Finchcocks Musical Museum in Kent, England, for the label established by keyboard player Steven Devine, who was the museum’s last assistant curator. Historical performance in the UK owes much to the insight of keyboard player and collector Richard Burnett and his wife Katrina. From the early 1970s until their retirement in 2015, the Burnetts amassed a collection of over 100 historic keyboard instruments at Finchcocks, their eighteenth-century Georgian manor house. Through concert-giving and recordings, Finchcocks was an important catalyst during the formative years of post-war historical performance in Britain. The Museum hosted many of the leading British exponents of historical performance, including Sue Addison, Alan Hacker, Christopher Hogwood, Colin Lawson, Trevor Pinnock, Stephen Preston, Lesley Schatzberger, Simon Standage and Jennifer Ward Clarke. Ensemble f2’s Danzi recordings, made at Finchcocks between April 2013 and June 2015, are a fitting tribute to its musical legacy.

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