Beethoven, Moscheles, Schubert & Strauss: Themes & Variation

This album of works for flute and piano presents a sequence of 19th-century variations exploring the virtuosic, lyric and popular impulses of the genre. Ignaz Moscheles’ Variations concertantes is a graceful work by one of the greatest piano virtuosos of his time in which both instruments are given equal importance. Richard Strauss’s Introduktion, Thema und Variationen – composed when he was 15 years old – is an example of the young composer’s precocity. Beethoven’s contribution was aimed at the British amateur market with its selection of popular songs, while Theobald Böhm’s arrangements of Schubert Lieder from Winterreise and Schwanengesang reveal some of the composer’s most beautiful and expressive melodies.