The name Franz von Suppé is well known to contemporary wind band players thanks to three frequently performed overtures: Morning, Noon, and Night in Vienna, Poet and Peasant and Light Cavalry. General listeners are likely to know Suppé's music as well, largely through the same three pieces, which appear regularly on televised New Year's concerts, in animated films and, perhaps most frequently, as filler during commencement exercises. While Suppé's reputation may today be limited to a handful of musical warhorses, he was, from about 1860 until his death in 1895, one of the most celebrated composers of European light opera. The collection considered here, which consists of eight overtures, four marches and a set of variations performed by the excellent Royal Scottish National Orchestra and conducted by Neeme Järvi, goes a long way toward increasing our access to this once celebrated composer of Viennese operetta.

Born in Spalato, Dalmatia (now Split, Croatia) in 1819, the composer's given name – Francesco Ezechiele Ermenegildo Cavaliere Suppé Demelli – foreshadowed what would prove to be a cosmopolitan career. His Belgian father and Viennese mother seem never to have encouraged a life in music, but instead sent their gifted son to Padua to pursue a degree in law. His father's death in 1835 propelled the young man to his mother's hometown where he studied with Ignaz von Seyfried and Simon Sechter. By 1840 he was working as an assistant at the Theater in der Josefstadt, as well as at several other houses controlled by Franz Pokorny in Baden, Ödenburg (Sopron) and Pressburg (Bratislava), where he completed some 20 stage works. Suppé's posthumous reputation has no doubt suffered thanks to his work in once popular genres that hold little currency for audiences today. The earliest piece in this collection, Ein Morgen, ein Mittag und ein Abend in Wien (1844), is an overture to just such a work: not so much an operetta as a play with interspersed songs. While the production itself was a flop – it ran for just three performances at the Theater in der Josefstadt in February of 1844 – Suppé's spritely overture was an instant success. The next year he transferred to Pokorny's newly acquired Theater an der Wien where he would work until 1862. In his new position as Kapellmeister, Suppé conducted a number of important performances and wrote a string of scores for staged comedies. Included on this disc is the overture to Dichter und Bauer (1846). Once again, the play made little impact, but Suppé's overture was an unqualified success, no doubt thanks to its modelling on the Italian opera composers whose works were experiencing considerable cachet in Vienna.

During the 1840s and 1850s, Suppé's original operettas were often unfavourably compared to those of his more popular Italian models, composers like Rossini and Donizetti. The appearance of Jacques Offenbach's Le mariage aux lanterns at the Carltheater in 1858, however, ignited a new Viennese vogue for operettas in the Parisian style, and with that vogue came new opportunity for Suppé. Working first at the Kaitheater and then as Kapellmeister at the Carltheater (between 1865 and 1882), Suppé composed dozens of Offenbachian operettas, and it is these now mostly unfamiliar works whose overtures dominate this collection: Pique Dame (1864), Die schöne Galathée (1865), Leichte Kavallerie (1866), Isabella (1869), Boccaccio (1879), and Das Modell (1895). Although Suppé's overtures are delightful gems, they were never meant to be heard back to back, and so it is quite welcome that this disc presents – in addition to the usual suspects – some contrasting pieces. Heard here are marches from Über Berg, Über Thal (date unknown), Boccaccio (1879), and Donna Juanita (1880); a potpourri arranged by Max Schönherr on materials from Fatinitza (1876); and a set of variations on the student song ‘Was kommst dort von der Höh’?’ adapted by Eugen Felix Richard Thiele.

Almost all of the pieces on this Chandos release have been made available before, most notably on the six-CD Marco Polo collection completed in the 1990s by the Slovak State Philharmonic Orchestra (Košice) and conducted by Alfred Walter and Christian Pollack (now available through the Naxos Music Library). Comparing the two performances will be largely a matter of taste, as both orchestras play well. Järvi's direction tends to be a bit more precise, if sometimes too fast (Walter takes more than ten minutes to get through Dichter und Bauer, while Järvi manages it in a blazing nine and a half). Nonetheless, Järvi's skilful leadership reveals the gracefulness of Suppé's orchestration, especially in softer passages. The clarity of counterpoint in Pique Dame is most welcome, as are the glorious cello solos in Dichter und Bauer and Isabella. Suppé overtures are famous for their rousing conclusions, and these are played here with all the vigour and excitement we might expect of Rossini or Offenbach (most thrilling are the endings of Boccaccio, Isabella and the furious Ein Morgen, ein Mittag und ein Abend in Wien). Less satisfying, to this listener at least, was Leichte Kavallerie, where the Hungarian theme was presented with the requisite combination of lush and gritty strings, but lacked the familiar schmaltz. Similarly, Pique Dame seemed a bit too slow, and its tempo change surprisingly sloppy.

Naturally, the sound quality found on this newer disc is cleaner than that on the Marco Polo collection. Here, the warm bass response makes the fanfare of Leichte Kavallerie almost heart stopping. The Chandos CD is available in their Super Audio format (recorded in 24-bit/96kHz 5.0-channel surround sound). Unfortunately, they sent compressed .mp3 files for review, which makes a full assessment of the recording quality impossible. Suffice it to say that even in compressed format played back on a modest audio system, these recordings were well balanced and rich, if a bit muddy.

The liner notes for the collection, by the insightful Calum MacDonald, are helpful and beautifully written but contain two glaring problems. First, the notes wisely treat the operettas in chronological order, but mysteriously the CD does not do the same. The listener/reader thus has to jump around, either in MacDonald's essay or through the recordings themselves. Even more problematically, MacDonald's text focuses not on the overtures heard here, but rather on the plots of the respective operettas. This is an understandable oversight: what can we say about music that at first hearing can seem alternately too familiar, too bombastic, and too saccharine; music that, in short, appears all cut from the same cloth? Writing about warhorses is, after all, never easy.

Nevertheless, these overtures are not all-cloying predictability, and indeed a great deal can be said about them. To take just one, less familiar example: the plot of Das Modell concerns three pairs of uncertain lovers whose couplings are repeatedly thrown into doubt. The central pair consists of the washerwoman Coletta and her love interest, the newspaper peddler Niccolo. Coletta, much to Niccolo's chagrin, supplements her income by acting as a model for the painter Tantini. On its very surface, then, the operetta engages with the economic realities of late nineteenth-century Vienna, the common association of washerwomen with sexual promiscuity, and the too frequent confusing of modelling with prostitution. The operetta also directly confronts the unequal powers of gender at a moment in world history when the merits of universal suffrage were often debated.

The overture itself reflects these tensions as it moves through five of the operetta's themes, along with some newly composed transition material. The opening Moderato references a sinuous melody scored for clarinet and strings that will later be used to depict Coletta's rustic life. This is followed by an Allegro, which MacDonald describes as a ‘typically good-natured galop’, but which Jeremy Starr has shown to be representative of Coletta's distress at discovering Niccolo's infatuation with another woman.Footnote ¹ The tension is made clear by the half-step relationship between the repeated rhythms in the upper strings and woodwinds, and the motivic pattern in the low brass, violas, cellos and basses. Following a brief connecting bridge, a contrasting Andante espressivo uses a theme associated with Niccolo's poor decisions in love and his lack of luck in carrying them out. The opening tempo then reasserts itself, but now with two new themes. The first is associated with Stirio, a salami factory owner who will save Niccolo's financial fortunes. A brief transition alludes to triumphal material from near the operetta's end, and the final theme is drawn from a march in which Coletta brags of her professional and sensual skills. The overture ends with a coda that refers back to the distress motive heard at the opening of the overture, but now presented in a resolved and more harmonically stable form. In short, the overture is not a simple pastiche of themes, but rather an introduction to the operetta's characters, a synopsis of its plot and a summary of its moral code. Gender too is central to the overture: Niccolo may stand at the overture's centre, but he is represented in his most negative light; it is Coletta's themes that frame him, and the resolution of her distress that propels the harmonic motion.

To make matters even more interesting, Suppé died while Das Modell was still far from complete, and the work (likely including the overture) was finished by several of his collaborators including Julius Stern and Antonio Zamara. In spite, or perhaps because, of Suppé's death, the show was an unqualified success. After its premiere at the Carltheater in October of 1895, Das Modell appeared in Hamburg, New York, Berlin and Budapest. In short, this operetta and its seemingly trite overture can serve as a gateway to studies of economic history, gender, collaboration and reception. Similar stories could be told of the nationalistic and exotic strains found in so many of the overtures written around the time of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise. Given that Suppé's current reputation rests on just a handful of such pieces, this compact disc collection is surely worth the sale price, and casual listeners will be delighted by the performances of both old favourites and lesser-known gems. It is worth hoping, however, for a future recording that engages more forcefully with the rich social and musical legacy of mid and late nineteenth-century Viennese operetta.