Kammspielwerke aus Wien und Prag: Tanzmusik / Musical Boxes from Vienna and Prague: Dance Music

From the early years of the 19th centuryon also in the Austrian empire, in Vienna and Prague, musical boxes were made. They are appreciated nowadays by collectors and conoisseur for their fine craftmanship and outstanding quality of tone. It was Anton Olbrich in Vienna and Frantisek Rzebitschek in Prague in their first years who created what is known today as the „Viennese style“ musical box movement. The movements were built in mantle clocks, picture clocks and also in cassettes. The instruments presented here comprise a period of about 50 years. The earliest stem from the 1830s, the last from the eighties of the 19th century. This CD offers a choice of dance melodies centering around the works of Johann Strauß the elder, Johann Strauß the younger and Josef Strauß. Apart from works by the Strauß family, Lanner´s works were obviously very much liked and also minor composere were entered into the musical programms on the cylinders as one can see with compositions by Kaulich and Bánat. Thus the repertoire of the instruments is mirroring the taste of the people buying and ordering musical automata from the 1830s onwards. Besides the special technical conception of the Viennese style movements also a typical kind of musical arrangement was created which did not change over the decades and became quite different to the sound of the typical musical box arrangement of later swiss movements. The recordings presented here were made with the intention of entering a new field of sientific research, preserving the favourite tunes of their time on an authentic sourse and allowing some insight in contemporary performance practice.