The 18th Century American Overture

Sinfonia Finlandia Jyväskylä/Patrick Gallois Naxos 8.559654***

The music of 18th-century America is an unknown quantity to most people. So be prepared for a shock if you try out the seven works collected here. The composers represented (James Hewitt, Alexander Reinagle and Benjamin Carr) were practitioners of the medley overture, a genre that, in modern parlance, does exactly what it says on the tin. These overtures made medleys of popular tunes, including anything from popular songs to Irish and Scottish dance music and, in one case, a chunk of Mozart's Piano Concerto in D minor. Politics even makes a showing in two pieces with Federalin their titles. None of the pieces recorded here survived intact. Orchestration and missing passages have been reconstructed by Bertil van Boer. However, the seven pieces here, nicely performed under Patrick Gallois, constitute the entirety of this repertoire that's survived. See url.ie/57c6