Romberg: Violin Concertos

Born in Lower Saxony just three years before Beethoven, the violinist Andreas Romberg (1767-1821) was, like him, a virtuoso instrumentalist of precocious gifts. His career too was radically affected by the Napoleonic Wars and a formative encounter with Haydn. And, as with Beethoven, his most popular work was a choral setting of a poem by Schiller: Das Lied von der Glocke, premiered in 1809. Romberg wrote an enormous number of violin concertos, but only sixteen manuscript scores of his entire oeuvre have survived, all of them in Hamburg. Chouchane Siranossian has decided to revive and make the world premiere recording of three concertos, thus revealing an interesting composer and a trio of highly virtuosic works.