(1709 –1789)
| Sinfonia in D major, No. 53 (Trumpet Symphony) - première recording | 12:03 |
| Sinfonie in D minor, No. 56 | 11:25 |
| Sinfonia in G minor (with fugue), No. 29 | 12:56 |
| Sinfonia in D major, No. 52 | 10:18 |
| Sinfonie in F minor, No. 43 | 15:04 |
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Franz Xaver Richter was the oldest of the composer-performers who made up what came to be known as the ‘Mannheim school’, but he stood apart from the others and moved on while the reputation of the Mannheim court orchestra was at its height. He was born in 1709, probably in Holleschau. In 1740 Richter became vice-Kapellmeister at the court of the princeabbot of Kempten, a picturesque town on the banks of the river Iller between Munich and Lake Constance.
In 1744, the year after his marriage, his ‘grandes simphonies’ were published in Paris. He moved to Mannheim, as composer and bass singer, in 1747; an oratorio by him was performed there on Good Friday the following year. That oratorio, La deposizione dalla croce, was written at the request of the Elector Carl Theodor, who was responsible for turning Mannheim into an important centre of music. Under the leadership of Johann Stamitz, the orchestra built up an international reputation. In 1769 he became Kapellmeister at Strasbourg Cathedral; we get a glimpse of him in a letter that Mozart wrote to his father from Strasbourg, in which he says that Richter ‘now lives very economically, for instead of forty bottles of wine a day he only swills about twenty’, and goes on to mention a ‘charmingly written’ new mass.
Richter’s output included over eighty symphonies, many concertos and chamber works, thirty-nine masses and three settings of the Requiem.On his death in Strasbourg in 1789, the composer was succeeded by his assistant, Ignaz Pleyel, to whom he had already delegated some of his duties.
Richter’s symphonies were numbered in a thematic catalogue compiled at the beginning of the twentieth century. The numbering does not follow the dates of composition, which in many cases can only be conjectured.
from notes by Richard Lawrence
