Gouvy: The Complete Symphonies / Mercier

Born in 1819 as a Prussian citizen in a Saarbrücken suburb then named Goffontaine (today’s Scheidt-Schafbrücke), when Louis Théodore Gouvy died in 1898 he was regarded as a Frenchman in Germany and as a German in France. No other foreign composer’s works were performed as frequently in Leipzig during the 1850s as those by Gouvy. In his symphonic oeuvre, Gouvy displays the bravura and clarté that his contemporaries valued in his music. “Melodic richness, natural sovereignty in the treatment of harmony, and a completely unaffected originality… play[ed] with fine nuance…” (klassik-heute)