Franz Xaver Gebel was born in Fürstenau (Milin) near Breslau (Wrocław) in 1787 and received his musical education in Vienna, as did many of his Silesian peers. His list of teachers included Abbé Vogler and Johann Georg Albrechtsberger.

Gebel’s compositions apparently made quite an impression on his contemporaries. Almost 20 years after Gebel’s death, the String Quintet no.8 and the Double Quintet op.28 were published at the Julius Schuberth publishing house in Leipzig in 1862. Having produced eight string quintets, Gebel had already extensively explored the possibility of extending this particular chamber combination with two cellos.

Carl Schuberth was born in Magdeburg in 1811 and had a glittering career as a virtuoso cellist. His biography is extensively described in the Musikalisches Conversations-Lexicon of his older brother, Julius Schuberth, whose publishing house also published a series of Carl’s compositions.

Carl Schuberth’s Octet op.23 was printed in Leipzig by Julius Schuberth’s publishing house in 1848. The four movement work begins with an extended Allegro in a bright E major. The second movement in A major headed Andante is particularly charming with its song-like cello cantilena.

The Hoffmeister Quartet was founded in 2002 with the goal of rediscovering string quartets from the Classic and Early Romantic periods in their nearly untapped complexity and of performing this music as it would have sounded at the time it was written. Named for Franz Anton Hoffmeister – the contemporary, friend, and colleague of Mozart and Haydn – the ensemble always also includes string quartets in its programs from numerous and less well known masters of their time next to famous pieces by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

The Wrocław Baroque Orchestra was founded in 2006 and is a permanent component of the National Forum for Music in Breslau/Wrocław (NFM), one of the most significant music institutions in Poland. Its repertoire includes instrumental works as well as large-scale oratorios, from the baroque to the romantic period. The artistic director of the orchestra ever since its foundation has been the renowned cellist Jaroslav Thiel. The ensemble of soloists, made up of the lead players of the orchestra, appear in various combinations and have already performed numerous masterworks of the 19th century on historical instruments.