Joseph Martin Kraus was a German contemporary of Mozart’s – the two men were born in the same year, but Kraus lived one year longer – who spent most of his brief career at the court of Gustavus III in Stockholm. He was induced to go there by contacts with a group of intellectuals he met at Gottingen; later he belonged to a similar group in Stockholm, and he visited Vienna and Esterhaza, Paris and London. His music, admired by Haydn and Gluck, has a fiery, passionate quality that is often compared to the Haydn of the early 1770s (the so-called Sturm und Drang period), but although there are resemblances to Haydn – listen to the Andante of the justly admired C minor Symphony here, and the way he varies his themes, close to Haydn of the 1790s – his music of the 1780s is stylistically more advanced; he is perhaps better seen as belonging to the North German symphonic tradition, and certainly some of his gestures and his sense of drama have a good deal in common with C. P. E. Bach. The latest work here is the overture for Voltaire’s Olympie, a fine D minor movement written in 1782 whose sombre slow introduction returns at the end just when one might have expected the major-key second subject to be cheerfully recapitulated.
Kraus’s music doesn’t shirk true seriousness, and he was certainly no less ambitious, and scarcely less successful, in the three symphonies here than were Mozart and Haydn at the same date, the early 1780s. The E flat work, nearly all in triple (or compound) metre, has powerful momentum as well as elegant logic to its first movement, graceful melody in its Larghetto (especially the major section with solo oboe) and energetic contrapuntal development in its finale. The C major Symphony starts as if it is going to be a minor-key work, in its slow introduction, but is not quite such a consistently impassioned piece. Last comes the C minor work that has justly won much admiration for Kraus – it is very forceful, and very original too, broad in scale, full of interesting ideas and ingenious texture as well as vigorously argued development.
The performances here are full of life and strongly committed to the music: there is plenty of tension in the outer movements of the C minor work and shapely playing in the slow ones. All three symphonies, and one more, are also available on a Capriccio disc by Concerto Koln, and some listeners may prefer the cooler, vibrato-less sound of period instruments and the more abstract style of performance there; certainly the Cologne playing is very polished, and possibly more natural-sounding – the absence of a conductor leads, here, to a less inflected performance – but it is also rather wanting in personality and commitment (listen in particular to the Andante of the C minor, taken much faster and done less expressively). The new Swedish version offers what are clearly modern performances, but nevertheless stylish ones, and is the more vividly recorded; if compelled to choose between them I might well sink my usual preference for period instruments in favour of these more strongly characterized readings. '