Rodolphe Kreutzer - Violin Concerto No.1 in G Major, Laurent Albrecht Breuninger (violin), Südwestdeutsches Kammerorchester, Pforzheim, Timo Handschuh (conductor)
I. Allegro moderato – 00:00
II. Pastorale – 14:32
III. Rondeau – 18:00
Rodolphe Kreutzer (15 November 1766 – 6 January 1831) was a French violinist, teacher, conductor, and composer of forty French operas. Despite Kreutzer’s many works for the theatre, he is best remembered as a violinist-composer. He is also famous for having one of Beethoven’s most important violin and piano pieces, the Kreutzer Sonata, op.47, dedicated to him.
Kreutzer displayed musical precocity as a boy and began violin lessons with his father in 1771. He later studied with Anton Stamitz, and appeared as a public performer at the age of twelve and as a member of the orchestra of the Chapelle du Roi when he was sixteen. He was already a composer at this early date, and by 1780 he performed at a concert of the Concert spirituel with his teacher Stamitz, fully two years in advance of the great founder of the French violin school, Giovanni Battista Viotti. He became one of the foremost violin virtuosos of his day, appearing as a soloist until 1810.
Kreutzer was an integral part of the first generation of the newly formed Paris Conservatoire in the 1790s, and was instrumental in forming the violin pedagogy of the new revolutionary institution, teaching until 1826, and a member of the Conservatoire’s council from 1825 to 1830. In The Cambridge Companion to the Violin, Stowell asserts that Kreutzer was one of the major French pedagogues of the 19th century.
Kreutzer wrote his nineteen violin concertos during his active years as a virtuoso. After he had found it necessary to abandon his solo career in 1810, he did not compose a single other such work. Although the concertos adhere to the traditional three-movement design, they contain numerous innovative elements, formal surprises, motivic-thematic interdependencies, and genial ideas.
Though tending toward romanticism in some ways, his music displays a classical restraint and clarity of expression. His legacy also includes chamber music and music for the theatre, including some works of more than historical interest.
