…the players are in tune and her tempos, not absurdly fast in the flanking movements and nicely moderate in the slow ones, fit Gassmann’s ambience perfectly…

…I recommend you buy it, put it on, and enjoy the party.

…Naxos’ Florian Leopold Gassmann: Opera Overtures does serve to lift the veil on this neglected figure of the eighteenth century and the disc has more than its share of attractive and entertaining music.

The Eclipse Chamber Orchestra, led by its music director, Sylvia Alimena, applies brightness and joy, demonstrating very effectively the composer’s ability to write well-crafted, rather pretty music in a style that was attractive in his lifetime. Alimena who together with another twenty-two of her colleagues at the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington formed the Eclipse Chamber Orchestra, has had a distinguished career both as a conductor and as a French horn player. Her interpretation of these overtures does full justice to the composer, expressively extracting the typical cheerfulness of this music in charming, attractive and extremely pleasant performances.

10 overtures by Florian Leopold Gassmann (1729–1774), played with tremendous style and élan by the Eclipse Chamber Orchestra under Sylvia Alimena. This is a small orchestra whose members are drawn from the National Symphony Orchestra (Washington, D.C.), and the group plays as if everyone is a virtuoso and everyone is having tremendous fun. The ensemble work is so good that the works here have the give-and-take of fine chamber music, as if a quartet has outgrown the confines of its size and emerged larger but equally well integrated…Each of these 10 overtures is in the same old-fashioned fast-slow-fast form. All feature bright and lively outer sections sandwiching some lovely lyricism in the middle…Alimena and the Eclipse Chamber Orchestra are to be commended for going beyond the standard 18th-century repertoire to dig up some worthy music by a composer who is now little known.