Enjoying Hummel 🎼🎹♫

I'd never heard of Johann Nepomuk Hummel. I found him at the bottom of a long list of playlists of "well known" composers¹. So I gave him a go.

I don't get on with Mozart so well. Too many notes. He'd squeeze in as many trills as he could². Hummel isn't so far off Mozart but he gives things a bit more space. Sometimes he's surprisingly modern. Some of his instrument choices are surprising too. I've never heard a mandolin concerto before. The orchestra had to play pretty quietly or the mandolin would have disappeared. There's a lot of piano pieces accompanied by only a few string players, which again gives a pleasing amount of space. The playlist is a bit over six hours and it's all good so far.

He's named after the patron saint of Bohemia, and his surname means "bumblebee".

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Some people don't like footnotes.

Don't worry - you can ignore this bit.

¹ As all the composers had a picture, the "dead white European male"-ness was very obvious. There was one American, but he was a dead white man.

² Beethoven's 5th - "Da-da-da...DUM" - as written by Mozart would have been "D-d-da diddle-da d-d-d-DUM".