Flute Concerto in A major

Johann Baptist Wanhal (1739-1813), one of the most gifted and historically important contemporaries of Haydn and Mozart, was a prolific and popular composer of concertos. His total output, which runs to over sixty works, can be compared with that of Leopold Hofmann whose concertos also enjoyed great popularity during the 1760s and 1770s. There is little way of knowing for whom the majority of them were written, given the scope of his freelance activities, but the fact that so many of the works were published – or found their way into contemporary thematic catalogues – suggests that he sought a wide public for them. Unlike a number of Wanhal’s other flute concertos the present work was not published during his lifetime although MS copies of the work were offered for sale in the Breitkopf Catalogue in the 1776-77 Supplement. It survives, like so many concertos of the period, in a single source; in this case a set of MS parts in the University Library in Lund, Sweden. The inclusion of oboes and horns in the orchestra marks the work as being a little unusual for a Viennese concerto, the more so as the full wind section is also employed in the slow movement. The solo writing is varied and interesting and although in some respects the concerto is a little conservative in style, it has a pleasing freshness of invention.