This selection of Salieri overtures covers almost the whole of his 30-year operatic career and a range of work from serious opera to farcical comedy. Even allowing for all that happened in the operatic world between 1770 and 1800, the music does not seem to deepen with age and maturity (does that happen only with the truly great?), and in fact the overture I found the most compelling is that of his Armida, written in 1771, with its nobly contemplative and atmospheric opening, its main section beginning with phrases akin to those of Gluck's Iphigenie en Aulide (composed three years later) and with a good deal of tension, and its final slow movement, which no doubt leads direct into the action of the opera. That of La secchia rapita, a year later, also has a sombre opening, but the nature of the plot—about a contest over a stolen bucket in which the gods from Olympus intervene—suggests that it is intended as a parody, as the banal faster music that follows would also seem to indicate. There are exalted ideas too in the overtures of the two big pieces originally written for Paris, in the 1780s, Axur and Les Danaides. There is spirited music in the Don Chisciotte overture, of 1770, including some that seems to be illustrative (violins apparently tilting at windmills). La grotta di Trofonio (1785), popular in Vienna in Mozart's day, has a dark C minor introduction though a none too subtle continuation.
I have to say that the disc does include a good deal of quite crude writing, limited in imagination and inventive force, lacking sense of direction and rhythmically four-square; much, too, of noisy, over-busy and sometimes grandiose (rather than grand) music, this especially perhaps in the later pieces, some of which give an indication of the line of descent to Rossini (Il talismano of 1788, and Il ricco d'un giorno of 1784, for example) and even Beethoven, who was of course a Salieri pupil (listen to Cesare in Farmacusa, 1800). Still, there is a lot of colourful instrumental writing, with enterprising use of the wind (some overtures include trombones, some clarinets). ''Puzza di musica'' (''it reeks of music''), Gluck is quoted as saying of a Salieri work; I have to say that I find the odour decidedly intermittent, but then our ears are spoilt by Haydn and Mozart, Bach's sons and Boccherini, among others of the time whose inventive talent was superior. The Radio orchestra from Bratislava gives a lively and efficient account of these pieces and is well recorded, even if the balance sometimes seems surprising.'