Joseph Martin Kraus is all but forgotten now, just another 18th-century boy who rebelled against his family’s wishes that he pursue a sensible career in law and instead fell in love with art. Look him up and you’ll find references to “the Swedish Mozart”, a nickname that has more to do with the brevity of his life than with the music he composed during it.
In his native Germany and then in Stockholm, where he teetered between poverty and celebrity, Kraus’s drug was Sturm und Drang: a cocktail of wild drama and intense melancholy that glanced back to the baroque and anticipated the gothic. His pale, doomy Symphony in C minor is inflected with an Italianate vocalism that was brought to the fore in Pavlo Beznosiuk’s performance with the Academy of Ancient Music, its tense skeins of violins and violas underpinned by the solemn tone of the bassoon and the horrified glare of the horns.
Although Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide is the reference point in Kraus’s 1783 symphony, earlier and later voices crowd in: a hint of sonata da chiesa formality, a suggestion of a distraught bel canto heroine, Beethovenian didacticism and the breathlessness of a consumptive. (Kraus died of tuberculosis at the age of 36.)
Richly imagined, it was the highlight of Music from the Dark Side, not least for its harmonic audacity. Haydn’s Symphony No 49 La Passione and Mozart’s Symphony No 25 sounded carefree by comparison, although both are marked with sombre, sexy minuets and both were vulnerable to soggy octaves in the AAM’s bass line. In Frantisek Benda’s Concerto for Violin and Strings in D minor there was more vocalism from Beznosiuk in the delicate, double-stopped cadenzas and the balmy Adagio un poco Andante, an aria in all but name.