Carl Friedrich Abel - Keyboard Concerto, Op. 11, No. 1 (1774)

Carl Friedrich Abel (baptized 22 December 1723 – 20 June 1787) was a German composer of the early Classical era. He was a renowned player of the viola da gamba and produced significant compositions for that instrument. He was director of music at the Dresden court from 1743, and moved to London in 1759, becoming chamber-musician to Queen Charlotte in 1764. He founded a subscription concert series there with Johann Christian Bach. According to the Catalogue of Works of Carl Friedrich Abel (AbelWV), he left 420 compositions, with a focus on chamber music.

Please support my channel:
https://ko-fi.com/bartjebartmans

6 Keyboard Concertos, Op. 11 (1771)

No. 1. Keyboard Concerto in F major, WK 53
Dedication: Charlotte, La Reine de la Grande Bretagne

1. Allegro ma non troppo (0:00)
2. Menuet (5:41)

Sabine Bauer, forte piano and the La Stagione Frankfurt conducted by Michael Schneider

One of Abel's works became famous due to a misattribution: in the 19th century, a manuscript symphony in the hand of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was catalogued as his Symphony No. 3 in E flat, K. 18, and was published as such in the first complete edition of Mozart's works by Breitkopf & Härtel. Later, it was discovered that this symphony was actually the work of Abel, copied by the boy Mozart, evidently for study purposes, while he was visiting London in 1764. That symphony was originally published as the concluding work in Abel's Six Symphonies, Op. 7.

A first catalogue of Abel's works was published in 1971 by Walter Knape, Abel-Werkverzeichnis, with 233 work numbers.

In 2015 new manuscripts of Abel's viola da gamba music were found in the library of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, in a collection from the Maltzahn family palace in the town of Milicz in Poland,[7] originally brought back from London by Count Joachim Carl of Maltzan [de]. Many of them were published by Edition Güntersberg.

A new catalogue, of now 420 works, was published by Ortus Musikverlag in 2023, Catalogue of Works of Carl Friedrich Abel or AbelWV, edited by Günter von Zadow. It takes into account many newly discovered works, and additional sources for known works.