Ferdinand Ries - Symphony No. 7 in A minor, Op. 181, Howard Griffiths & Zurich Chamber Orchestra
I. Allegro con spirito - 00:00
II. Larghetto con moto - 10:40
III. Scherzo: Allegro non troppo - 18:58
IV. Introduzione: Largo - Finale: Allegro vivace - 24:03
Ferdinand Ries (28 November 1784 - 13 January 1838) was a German composer. He was a friend, pupil and secretary of Ludwig van Beethoven.
Ries had made his way to Vienna in 1801 in order to continue his education with Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), who was an old friend of his father and by then already famous as a pianist and composer. He received instruction in piano and served Beethoven as a sort of private secretary. Beethoven the teacher was evidently quite pleased with his pupil's accomplishments inasmuch as he let Ries, who was not yet twenty years old, perform the soloist's part in his Piano Concerto No. 3 op. 37 at a concert in Vienna's Augarten on August 1,1804. Ries was even allowed to write his own solo cadenza for this concerto.
The most important milestone in Ferdinand Ries’s career was London, where he took up residence in 1813 (after previous stays in Paris, Saint Petersburg and Stockholm) and where he soon made a name for himself as a pianist and composer. Johann Peter Salomon, his father’s erstwhile violin teacher and now the doyen of the London concert scene, introduced him into this city’s world of music. In 1815 he was appointed director of the London Philharmonic Society, of which Salomon had been one of the founders, and in this capacity commissioned Beethoven’s 9th Symphony in 1817.
In 1824 Ries left London with his family and settled in Bad Godesberg, on the Rhine near Bonn. In 1827 he moved from there to Frankfurt , where he worked as a freelance composer. Between 1825 and 1837 he directed the Lower Rhenish Music Festival eight times, alternating between Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen), Düsseldorf and Cologne.
In 1837, in collaboration with Franz Gerhard Wegeler, an old friend of the Ries family and a friend of Beethoven’s since his youth, Ferdinand Ries wrote his “Biographische Notizen über Ludwig van Beethoven”, a significant and reliable collection of memories of his friend and teacher. It was published in Koblenz in 1838, just a few months after his death.
Ferdinand Ries left a copious oeuvre comprising as many as 186 compositions with opus numbers and approximately 100 without opus numbers in all of the genres common at that time (with the exception of church music). The great historical significance of this oeuvre, which dates from the transitional period between Viennese Classicism and Romanticism, is today on the verge of rediscovery.
Ferdinand Ries' symphonies are wonderful examples of the glorious orchestral music composed during the early 19th century. The steadily increasing sophistication and complexity evident in Ries' symphonies clearly represent a composer steadily emerging as a major force in European music. Thus, what an absolute shame it is that Ries is so little known or played these days.
Ries numbered his eight symphonies more or less according to the order of their publication. The numbering does not correspond to the chronological order of their composition. Two symphonies remained unpublished.
Ferdinand Ries's last symphony, Symphony No. 7 in A minor op.181 was composed in 1835, more than a decade after the two symphonies immediately preceding it, the Symphonies No. 6 and WoO 30. The occasion was evidently a compositional commission, as Ries reported to his brother Joseph, a London resident, on March 9, 1835, »[...] I now want to write a symphony ordered for Vienna”.
The harmony of this symphony is characterized by much greater abruptness and boldness, and its instrumentation involves much greater contrasts than in his earlier works. The beginning of the first movement already reveals Ries's intention to emancipate himself from the symphonic conventions to which he more or less remained true until that time.