Sinfonia in D Major (“La Veneziana”)
Antonio Salieri was one of the most important, successful, and talented composers in Vienna in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Along with European luminaries such as Gluck, Paisiello, Soler, Gassmann and others, his compositions helped to create the sound of late classical music. There were also two others, by the way: Haydn and Mozart. The tragedy of history is that it is reductive, and only the latter composers have come to dominate our thinking and programming. Rightly so, of course, but there’s a lot of great music by the lesser masters. Salieri was a native of northern Italy, who moved in his early maturity to Vienna, where he stayed for the rest of his life—with some side trips to successful operatic commissions in Paris--and established a formidable >>>