Cherubini: Symphony in D major, Medee, Faniska, Lodoiska overtures.(Sound recording review)

Cherubini: Symphony in D major; Medee, Faniska, Lodoiska overtures. Piero Bellugi, Orchestre Sinfonica di Sanremo. Naxos 8.557908.

If you are like me, you may think of Luigi Cherubini as an eighteenth-century classical composer, whose major works are a Requiem, several masses, and a few operas, known today mainly by their overtures. I found myself only half right: I got the music but not the date. In fact, Cherubini lived from 1760-1842, a contemporary not only of Mozart and Haydn but of Beethoven, Rossini, Schubert, and Schumann. Unlike these other gentlemen, however, Cherubini didn't write four symphonies or nine or forty-one or a hundred-and-four. He wrote one: the Symphony in D major contained on this disc.

I mean, you'd think that if he were going to write only one symphony, he'd make it a lasting one, but, alas, it probably deserves the neglect it gets. Despite Cherubini having written his one-and-only symphony in 1816, long after Beethoven had revolutionized the nature of the symphony and the symphony orchestra and just a year before Beethoven premiered his Ninth symphony, Cherubini's little symphony seems like a throwback to the previous century.

Its four movements show little spark, ...