‘Forgotten to breathe….’ This recording presents the highly-praised composer, who was already known by his great operas and oratorios, in a more intimate light. He was heavily talented to express dramatic effects and passionate feelings. On that reason he was very often called ‘the Italian Gluck’. For a lot of his contemporary colleagues he had been regarded as the innovator of special sound affects for the orchestra, which he defined as ‘musical colours’ (crescendo, diminuendo), which on a later stage had been ascribed to Stamitz. There was a saying that some from the audience jumped from their seats during the crescendo and only realized during the diminuendo that they had stopped breathing when Jommelli presented these affects in Rome the first time. Captivated, Johann Friedrich Reichardt writes: ‘It was said that when Jommelli first used this effect in Rome the listeners involuntarily rose from their chairs and they realised that they had stopped to breathe only when the music began to mute again. I experienced this personally in Mannheim.’