Wenzel Pichel (1741-1805)—or, to use the name he was born with, Vaclav Pichl—was one of the most prolific composers of the classical era; Czech by birth, he spent most of his working life in Prague, Vienna and Milan, with a brief spell at Grosswardein (now Oradea, in Romania: hence this recording). He was a highly intelligent man and widely admired as a composer, performed by Haydn, preferred (by the Empress Maria Theresia) to Mozart. His output includes close on 100 symphonies, some 30 concertos, numerous chamber works and pieces for the violin (his own instrument), not to mention dozens of divertimentos, a few operas and many sacred works and even some fugues. The pieces recorded here are by no means routine productions. Pichl's style is quite distinctive but not easy to describe. He favours rather full and rich orchestral scoring; themes that tend to be brief, slightly foursquare and sometimes over-dependent on sequence, but avoid cliche by their individual turns of phrase; and a harmonic palette considerably more adventurous than that of most minor composers. There are quite a lot of oddities: solemn maestoso introductions (notably in the work subtitled Apollo, truly glowing), ingeniously devised themes made from quite modest material, rhythms that confound expectation, and in a couple of works, forms that behave unorthodoxly—the Op. 17 Symphony has, as it were, sections of movements folded into one another, and real poetry to some of the slow music.
It is not great music, of course. But it is often intriguing and sometimes very appealing, and it is certainly salutary for us, whose classical diet rarely goes beyond the two great masters, to hear something by a minor figure that isn't just Haydn or Mozart and water, but has quite a sharp flavour of its own. The Oradea Philharmonic is not specially accomplished, and their ensemble falls rather below normal recorded standards today; and I am not sure that their conductor always judges tempo accurately (the Andante of the Mars Symphony seems too fast for its running triplets to have the right touch of grace and eloquence). But the spirit is good, and the solo work in the Rondo of the B flat work and the Symphonie concertante (only its Adagio is in fact concertante) is very capable. This is certainly a recording that anyone with a touch of curiosity about the classical period ought to try.'