Weber: The Four Piano Sonatas - Janine Decosta

The Webers were a family of musicians not unlike the Bachs and Mozarts. Wolfgang Mozart, in fact, fell in love with one of the Weber girls and eventually married her sister, thereby becoming a cousin by marriage of the future composer of Der Freischutz, Oberon and the four piano sonatas on these records. 

Weber's sonatas are not as well-known as they should be. In the words of Kathleen Dale they "occupy a midway position between the classical and the romantic. They combine something of the rhythmic urge of Beethoven with the virtuosity of Clementi and Dussek and the lyricism of Schubert. They anticipate to no small degree the vivid coloring of Schumann, the sensuousness of Chopin and the rhetoric of Liszt. To play them is to be transported to a glowing world of sound, in which immediacy of expression counts for more than formal balance and the systematic development of thematic material."