Ensemble Amadeus

Ensemble Amadeus has excited listeners in Western Saxony for more than 20 years with its many concerts. Founded by Normann Kästner with eight musicians in 1997, the orchestra now includes more than 30 highly motivated amateurs and a few professionals. It specialises in 18th-century music, cultivating a repertoire of standard works from the classical period as well as composers of the so-called second rank who have largely vanished from the awareness of today’s concert audiences. Ensemble Amadeus regularly concertises with recognised soloists, in particular Jakob Spahn, the solo cellist of the Bavarian State Orchestra, with whom it maintains a close artistic partnership, recording among other things the cello concertos of Joseph Haydn and Georg Matthias Monn. Another long-term musical association exists with two church musicians, Markus Kaufmann, the cathedral organist at St Servatius in Quedlinburg, and Pascal Kaufmann, cantor at St Peter’s in Augustusburg and assistant to Samuel Kummer, the organist of Dresden’s Frauenkirche.
With these musicians the orchestra has performed Mozart’s concertos for two and three pianos (K. 242 and 365) and the C-minor Piano Concerto (K. 491) as well as harpsichord concertos by J. S. Bach and works for organ and orchestra by Alexandre Guilmant, Eugène Gigout and the contemporary Canadian composer Denis Bédard. Ensemble Amadeus has given the world première of Opus mediterraneo, a suite for orchestra by the Italo-German composer Jo Post, and played Mozart’s Concerto for Flute, Harp and Orchestra (K. 299) with Petra Ruzicka, the solo harpist of the Robert Schumann Philharmonic in Chemnitz. The ensemble’s concert tours have taken it to Poland and three times to Italy. For several years it has mounted an open-air concert in a four-sided farmyard in the founder’s native town, attracting more than 400 listeners annually.
This is Ensemble Amadeus’s first CD release. Featuring world première recordings of several symphonies by Carl Philipp Stamitz (1745–1801), it shows the orchestra striking out on new paths and bears witness to its current level of achievement.