Per il Luigi

Per il Luigi is the 17th instalment of the complete Haydn 2032 collection and presents some of Haydn's earliest symphonies; these were composed to showcase the talent of the musicians who joined the Esterházy court orchestra in the same period as Haydn himself. The centrepiece of the programme is Symphony No. 13 in D major from 1763, whose orchestration includes four horns and whose final movement contains a prefiguration of the famous theme of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, which would be composed twenty-five years later. The violin concerto in C major is marked in Haydn's work catalogue as 'fatto per il Luigi' and was dedicated to Luigi Tomasini (1741-1808), a violin virtuoso born in Pesaro and a friend of Haydn. Two centuries later, the young baroque violin virtuoso Dmitri Smirnov now brilliantly defends this repertoire with the Kammerorchester Basel under Giovanni Antonini.