Move over Beethoven

Get swept away by all composers Viennese - and not just the ones you know about, writes HEATH LEES.

If you think of classical music's glory days as a couple of decades on either side of 1800, with Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven making up the major composers' consortium in Vienna, then Uwe Grodd has a statistic that will make you blink.

"Of all the symphonies written around Beethoven's time," he says, "less than 1 per cent of the total was made up by these three famous composers. Yet they're just about the only ones we hear in our programmes nowadays."

Grodd, who conducts in and directs the International Music Festival starting on Sunday, aims to change all that, so he's built the festival around the theme "Beethoven's Time". In addition to music by the titanic trio, there will be symphonies and other works by some of the composers who lived in Vienna at the same time, but made it into the music history books only as footnotes.

"Some of them wrote an enormous amount of music," says Grodd, "often wildly popular with the Viennese, like Cimarosa's opera The Secret Wedding, which was the best-known opera during Beethoven's earliest years in the city - music he would have heard, maybe even raided for some of his own ideas."

Grodd admits that it's sometimes difficult to separate the music by these lesser-known composers from the additions by later musicians who freely added bits here and there.

"We've decided to be the first to use the original parts that Cimarosa himself made when he conducted the work in Vienna, rather than the usual later versions, which sometimes have changes lasting for nearly 100 bars."

As another "first", Grodd points to the Stabat Mater by Boccherini, who worked in Vienna as a young man and produced enormous amounts of music, including 120 string quintets. The Stabat Mater was written for a star soprano soloist of the time and the inevitable string quintet, but Boccherini reworked it all so that the demanding solo parts could be shared out between two sopranos.

In Auckland, these parts will be sung by Swedish soprano Maria Keohane, who amazed everyone last year with her purity of tone and technique, and another dazzling singer from closer to home, Deborah Wai Kapohe.

Those who may have heard of Cimarosa and Boccherini might be stumped by the name of Kraus - Joseph Martin Kraus - who came from Sweden but backpacked his way as a young man into Vienna, where he learned so much about opera and music theatre that people referred to him as "the Swedish Mozart". (And his short life matched Mozart's almost exactly.)

Kraus is to be represented by an overture and a cantata in Swedish, perfectly suited for Maria Keohane, and in Grodd's opinion even better than some of Mozart - "or at least than some of Mozart's weaker pieces", he says after a moment's pause.

How is it that a festival in faraway New Zealand is producing so many firsts and revivals of the Viennese musical scene of two centuries ago?

Grodd explains that Wellington-based publishing house of Artaria, directed by Allan Badley, a musicologist who spends much of his time researching the music of this period, has a close relationship with Naxos recordings, under the management of Klaus Heymann, the festival's principal sponsor. Artaria's editions are often taken up and performed through Naxos.

"We did the same kind of ear-opening programmes last year," says Grodd "and discovered that people loved the music of Vanhal, another non-stop Vienna-based composer of the period, who wrote more than 700 full-length works. This year's festival is more - much more - of the same idea."

Grodd doesn't mention it, but, in fact, two Vanhal choral works were recorded by Naxos following last year's festival, with Tower Voices New Zealand and the Aradia Ensemble. The resulting CD has hit the Classical Music jackpot, being nominated by America's Robert Emmert as "top pick" for the year, climbing to No 8 in the UK classical charts, and in New Zealand hitting the top spot for 12 weeks in Concert FM's classical charts.

Now a confirmed Vanhal fan, Grodd - a fine flautist in addition to everything else - is preparing to record a set of six of the the composer's flute quartets.

Although Grodd loves reviving the less-than-famous composers of Vienna's Golden Age of Music, he admits with a smile that yes, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were pretty good too, and he says the festival will take note of that as well.

But even here the changes will be rung, since he's decided to perform all 10 scenes of Beethoven's incidental music to Goethe's play Egmont, including the original parts for narrator (Raymond Hawthorne) and solo soprano (Keohane) instead of the single overture, which is often used as a concert curtain-raiser, but bears much of the story of Egmont in its music.

"Finding something new to do by Beethoven was hard," says Grodd, "but we managed."

Beethoven also appears with his more famous contemporaries throughout the festival, including his Choral Fantasy and triple concerto at the now-traditional "Banquet Finale", which combines a musical programme with a sit-down feast to mark the close of a week-long feast of music.