Carl Maria von Weber, whose resourceful father had hoped to turn him into a profitable child prodigy, is well known to have led an unusually unsettled life. How, despite constant travel, financial hardship, and with his risk-loving father perpetually in tow, he nevertheless managed at so young an age to produce a wealth of imaginative and successful compositions with such ease-while occasionally having to earn his living through work outside the musical profession-belongs among those mysteries that conventional wisdom cannot begin to explain.

This recording brings together five such works from those particularly turbulent early years in a program that is as virtuosic as it is entertaining. Unsurprisingly, Weber based his concertante variations largely on melodies whose popularity all but guaranteed enthusiastic applause. Yet the kaleidoscopic transformations of those themes, together with his thoroughly idiomatic writing for the solo instruments, give these works an enduring appeal that reaches far beyond the musical fashions of their day.