François-Joseph Gossec - Symphony in D "La caccia", Brook 62, Orchestre De Bretagne, Stefan Sanderling (conductor)
1. Grave maestoso - 00:00
2. Allegretto quasi allegro - 06:29
3. Menuetto 1, Menuetto 2, and Trio - 10:14
4. Tempo moderato di caccia - 15:17
François-Joseph Gossec (17 January 1734 - 16 February 1829) was a French composer of operas, string quartets, symphonies, and choral works.
„As a composer, François-Joseph Gossec lived through nearly an entire century and was a part of various epoch-making developments in musical history. He was born at the time of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s (1683 - 1764) „Tragédie lyrique” and died just as Hector Berlioz was finishing his „Symphonie fantastique”. As a composer, conductor, teacher and concert organizer, he not only witnessed but also had great influence on the transformation of the French capital’s musical scene.
Gossec was born in 1734 in Vergnies as the son of a Wallonian farmer. His musical talent soon became apparent and he was sent to obtain a musical education as a choir-boy at the collegiate church of Walcourt at the age of six.
In 1742, he was accepted into the choir of Antwerp Cathedral. In 1751, Gossec relocated to Paris, where he found employment as a violinist in the private orchestra of Alexandre Le Riche de La Popelinière, a wealthy patron of the arts and general tax farmer of the King’s. There he met both Jean-Philippe Rameau, who headed the orchestra for many years, and Johann Stamitz. The latter introduced Gossec to the achievements of the Mannheim School.
Gossec published 24 symphonies between 1756 and 1762. At the age of 25, he achieved his breakthrough as a composer with the “Grande Messe des morts”. It served as a model for Mozart, and Hector Berlioz referred to this work in his “Requiem”.
In 1769, he founded the Concert des amateurs, an association funded by private citizens, which hosted concerts, commissioned and performed new compositions and engaged performers and composers of international esteem. There, Gossec was the first to perform a symphony by Joseph Haydn. As early as 1773, he handed over the direction of the Concert des amateurs to Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and became the director of their competition, the Concert spirituels, which he modernised and restructured.
During the 1790s, Gossec dedicated himself to musical education. In 1795, he was instrumental in founding the Conservatoire de musique; he was appointed as one of the institute’s inspectors, together with the composers Grétry, Luigi Cherubini, Étienne-Nicolas Méhul and Jean-François Le Sueur. His work as a composer steadily decreased during the First French Empire under Napoléon (1808 - 1815). His “Symphonie à 17 parties” (1808 - 1809) and his “Messe des vivants” (1813) were to be his final creative highlights. From 1815, he led a secluded life in Passy, a town near Paris, where he died in 1829.” (From „François-Joseph Gossec - Biography - Berliner Festspiele”)