(1734-1829)
| Symphony in F major, Op. 12 No. 6 (B59) | 15:00 |
| Symphony in E flat major, Op. 5 No. 2 (B26) | 13:02 |
| Symphony in E flat major, Op. 12 No. 5 (B58) | 12:59 |
| Symphony in D major, Op. 5 No. 3 ‘Pastorella’ (B27) | 13:11 |
| Symphony in D major, (B86) | 12:17 |
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François-Joseph Gossec was born on 17 January 1734 (two years after Haydn) at Vergnies in the Netherlands province of Hainault, and died on 16 February 1829 (two months after Schubert) at Passy, near Paris; his Walloon peasant family name had numerous different spellings, ranging from Gaussé to Gossez via Gossec. His musical aptitude was recognized early, and when he was about six he was sent to the collegiate church at Walcourt, near Charleroi. Early in 1751 he went to Paris, armed with a letter of introduction to the great Jean-Philippe Rameau, who was then director of the private orchestra maintained by the fermier-général Le Riche de la Pouplinière, a wealthy patron of the arts.
Gossec joined the orchestra as a violinist, and became acquainted with the works of the Mannheim school through Johann Stamitz, who took over the direction of the orchestra from Rameau in 1754. Gossec succeeded Stamitz as director a year later, and after la Pouplinière’s death in 1762 became director of music at the private theatre of Louis-Joseph de Bourbon, Prince of Condé, at Chantilly, and remained there for eight years. In 1769 he founded the Concert des amateurs, which quickly acquired a reputation as one of the best orchestras in Europe and made a feature of commissioning new works and introducing distinguished guest artists. He was elected a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts of the Institut de France when it was established in 1795, and a member of the Swedish Academy of Music in 1799; and in 1804 he was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur. He left the Conservatoire when it was re-constituted by Louis XVIII in 1816,and spent the remaining years of his long and busy life in comparative obscurity in the suburb of Passy.
Mozart met Gossec in Paris in 1778, and in a letter to his father in Salzburg described him as ‘my very good friend, and a very dry man’. However that may be there is nothing dry or dull about Gossec’s compositions,which include some thirty stage works (operas – mostly comic, ballet, and incidental music); sacred and secular choral works, with effects that often anticipate Berlioz; concerted pieces and chamber music for a wide variety of instrumental combinations; a huge body of ‘Revolutionary’ music, both vocal and instrumental; and over fifty symphonies. His earliest symphonies (B13–18) probably date from 1753 or 1754, four or five years before Haydn entered the field, and his last (B91) from 1809, fourteen years after Haydn had left it. Of the thirty-six symphonies published in sets of six or three with opus numbers (Opp. 3–6, 8, 12 and 13) all but the last three were issued between 1756 and 1769.
from notes by Robin Golding
