The combinations of instruments on this disc of Classical-era chamber music -- violin, clarinet, and two guitars, or flute, clarinet, violin, two guitars, and cello -- look pretty strange, but there's a principle in operation that explains them. Filippo Gragnani (1767-1812), an Italian who went to make his fortune in Russia, was one of a group of composers, little known today, who wrote music in which one or more guitars would stand in for keyboards. In the years around 1800, as it is today, a guitar offered a way of reproducing a full musical texture that was inexpensive compared with a piano. A disc like this really shows the value of performance on historical instruments, for the combination of performance practice and engineering here makes you hear what Gragnani was up to. Hear especially the opening Quartetto, Op. 8, for clarinet, violin, and two guitars. The then-fresh sounds of the clarinet are set off by the accompaniment of the guitar pair, which is deployed so that it sounds a great deal like a fortepiano (indeed, having the sound of a fortepiano in your head prior to auditioning this disc will enhance the experience.) The concluding Sestetto has some of the same virtues but is a more diffuse work. Gragnani sounds like a composer who heard a lot of Hummel, and the opening movements of these two works are nicely balanced large-scale constructions; hear especially the half-step rise as the development section of the Quartetto and the subsequent path back to the tonic key. The slow movements of several of these pieces are attractively simple things, seemingly influenced by some kind of folk tradition. There are some dull stretches in the work of this minor composer; the Rondo of the Trio for flute, violin, and guitar, Op. 13, is monotonous. But the performances are very smoothly executed, with the period clarinet of Dieter Klöcker providing exciting counterpoint to the guitars, and this disc makes a worthwhile contribution to the growing field of recordings of guitar music from the Classical and early Romantic periods.
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