Enterprising as ever in their exploration of neglected and forgotten eighteenth-century repertoire, CPO and Naxos have simultaneously alighted on symphonies by Franz Ignaz Beck. Who he, you may well ask. Details of Beck’s life remain pretty sketchy. He was born in Mannheim in 1734, studied with the leader of the so-called Mannheim School, Johann Stamitz, and had to flee the city when he was framed by a jealous court rival who had feigned death in a duel with Beck. He then spent some time in Venice, where he is said to have studied with Galuppi, before eloping with the daughter of his patron to Naples. In the late 1750s he turned up in Marseilles and spent the rest of his life in France, dying in Bordeaux in 1809.
The New Oxford History of Music (OUP: 1973) describes Beck as “a Romantic born a generation too early”, largely on the strength of his four symphonies in the minor, composed, like all his symphonies, in the late 1750s and early 1760s. Certainly the G minor work on the CPO disc is an early example of the turbulent, pre-romantic, Sturm und Drang manner cultivated a few years later by Haydn and others. The outer movements are full of impassioned rhetoric, with bold gestures, striking chromaticism and abrupt, theatrical contrasts of rhythm, dynamics and texture. In the second half of each movement (like Johann Stamitz, Beck favoured the older binary structure over the newer sonata form, with its full recapitulation) the tension is screwed up with exciting sequences. But there is little true motivic development; and throughout Beck seems more interested in the sensation of the moment than in long-range balance and control.
The D minor Sinfonia is hardly less arresting. The first movement, opening with a ‘Mannheim’ crescendo, is less stormy than that in the G minor work but even more disjointed, with its alternation of pathos and brusqueness, its outre harmonic sequences and its odd hesitations as the music several times sinks to exhaustion. The finale, for once in full sonata form, makes powerful use of baroque-style sequences, while Beck’s characteristic sudden contrasts lend both the serenade-like Andantino and the minuet a restless, disquieting edge. The final symphony on the disc, in E flat, is closer to the typical Mannheim style in its brilliant, sweeping tuttis, rhythmic elan and slow-burn crescendos. There is some colourful and inventive horn writing at the close of the first movement, in the trio of the minuet (taken much more slowly than the minuet itself) and in the rollicking 3/8 finale. But the most original movement is the siciliano-style Un poco Adagio, full of strange harmonic deflexions and long, brooding pedal points. The Frankfurt period group, La Stagione, under Michael Schneider shape this thoughtfully; and elsewhere they bring plenty of verve and dramatic energy to Beck’s fiery, wilful music, with vivid contributions from the horns in the E flat Sinfonia. The recording is first-rate.
The five major-key symphonies on the Naxos disc are less distinctive, though several movements reveal Beck’s typical wayward streak – the opening Allegro molto of the G major, for instance, where eerie unisons suddenly interrupt the music’s lusty triple-time swing. The faster movements are predominantly cheerful Italianate pieces, short on memorable ideas but long on animated bustle, with frequent repetition of brief motifs, sometimes as echo effects. The first movement of the E major Sinfonia, Op. 13 No. 1, with its opening cuckoo calls, has more than a whiff of Vivaldi – a reminder that Beck studied in Venice. Best of the symphonies, I think, is the B flat, above all the sensuous Largo, with its eloquent broken violin phrases above gently pulsating inner parts and pizzicato basses. Under Nicholas Ward the Northern Chamber Orchestra (using modern instruments) give tidy, alert readings of all these symphonies, though bass-lines can chug a shade heavily and some of the finales, such as the conspiratorial Presto in the G major, sound over-cautious. At a fiver you won’t go seriously wrong. But there’s no doubt that the CPO disc contains the most individual and memorable music here.'