Following on from their highly successful debut album featuring works by Venturini (AUDITE97775), la festa musicale now make a welcome return to audite, once again performing little-known and yet high-quality repertoire: Gregor Joseph Werner (1693-1766), a titan at the birth of Viennese classicism, was Joseph Haydn’s immediate predecessor as Kapellmeister at the Esterházy court. First and foremost a preeminent composer of Latin sacred music, the majority of his instrumental music has been lost. Werner’s compositions, including the Salve Regina settings and Pastorellas presented here, reveal beguiling and inventive melodic lines and a bold sense of harmonic expression alongside enormous contrapuntal prowess. Haydn profited considerably from his predecessor and teacher: the late Mozartian synthesis of the “learned” and the “galant” styles was clearly already inherent in Werner’s music. Werner’s oeuvre, difficult to access and almost only available in individual parts, has been researched for decades by Lajos Rovatkay, who is also the conductor in these performances. Together with a stellar cast of soloists and la festa musicale, he now presents impressive interpretations of the works of this unjustly neglected master.