Keyboard Sonatas 3

Hoffmeister was one of the great figures in musical history. He was a founding father of the music publishing industry - his firm published Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and many others - as well as being a prolific composer. His operas, symphonies, concertos and chamber music were widely admired in Vienna and beyond. Not the least important of his works were those for the flute and the piano, for which a large audience existed. Among his most enjoyable, some of the piano works reveal Hoffmeister at his most searching, and forward-looking. This is the last of three volumes of the first complete recording of Hoffmeister's piano sonatas.

Hoffmeister wrote a series of piano sonatas, sonatinas and other pieces for the instrument. The use of fortepiano or harpsichord was specified, indicating their composition coincided with the transitional period from the Baroque to the Romantic periods. The sonatas display a considerable degree of melodic inspiration and harmonic skill, full of imaginative transformations as well as pithy wit. Far from mere salon entertainment the B major Sonata, in particular, shows a more experimental side of his art.