Meyerbeer was a precocious composer and this album traces some of his very earliest works. Der Fischer und das Milchmädchen was his first stage work, a charming rural vignette that contains all the essential features of a ballet-divertissement couched in writing that enchantingly evokes the 18th century. Collaborating with his teacher, the Abbé Georg Vogler, Meyerbeer composed Der Admiral in 1811. The following year saw Wirt und Gast with the vivid Oriental exoticism of its Janissary music, while Romilda e Constanza, his first italian opera, shows his complete assimilation of Rossinian models.

These are mostly previously unrecorded works. The score used in Wirt und Gast is the original conducting score which contains small pencil corrections made by Meyerbeer’s fellow pupil, Weber, who conducted the work.

Conductor Dario Salvi has recorded an album of Meyerbeer’s sacred music on 8573907 where American Record Guide commented: ‘Salvi’s arrangements work very well; they sound like they could have been written by Meyerbeer himself and they never get in the way of the texts. The sound is excellent’.