Christian Cannabich (1731-98) was for many years director of the Mannheim court orchestra, the greatest virtuoso band of its day, and he was a good friend to Mozart when the young man visited Mannheim and later Munich. He was a prolific and gifted composer and it’s unaccountable that this is the first CD devoted to him. He wrote 73 symphonies of which the late ones, written after the Mannheim court’s move to Munich, are the weightiest. The five examples here, all of them three-movement works, show an interesting musical personality. Clearly, orchestral colour and texture were important to Cannabich, more so than thematic content. The scoring here is rich and varied, with much interwoven dialogue involving the oboes and clarinets as well as the strings, and a pleasantly tuneful manner even if the tunes themselves are not specially distinctive. One might, unkindly, say that most of the material is made up of cliches; but the cliches are deftly used and the music is always spirited as well as formally shapely and well wrought. Of course, there are a lot of Mannheim crescendos, effectively handled to give shape to the structure.
The opening work, No. 63, is a spacious and noble D major piece with trumpets and drums, and No. 64 has a lively and attractive opening movement; but the ones I enjoyed the most were No. 67, with its graceful triple-metre opening movement, faintly folky melodies in the Andante and a witty finale, and No. 68, with its particularly colourful textures and its contrapuntal finale. Viktor Lukas and his Consort perform this music with relish; they don’t use period instruments but they play with a good feeling for the idiom, which is essentially that of the high classical era but with a voice of its own.'