Description
Among those composers' contemporary to Mozart and Beethoven, Jan Ladislaus Dussek counts as the most original, imaginative and often extreme. His life, as turbulent and eventful as his music, took him across Europe, from Bohemia to Paris to London, winning along the way a reputation as a dazzling keyboard virtuoso at a time when the piano itself was undergoing rapid evolution. His own music, written to exploit that virtuosity but also to appeal to the expanding market among Europe's middle-class for domestic music-making, mirrors the temper of his times - not least in his violin sonatas, which Julia Huber and Miriam Altmann have been documenting in this ground-breaking cycle on Brilliant Classics.