I love a composer with a big idea. In 1775 the Spanish prince Don Luis de Borbon found himself exiled to a back corner of Spain after a failed attempt to become King. During his time in Madrid, he was a patron of an up-and-coming young composer from Italy, Luigi Boccherini. But as his exile dragged on, he commissioned Boccherini to write him something to cheer him up and these delightful six symphonies were premiered in 1782. Unfortunately (in Boccherini’s mind) there was only a string quartet on hand to play these three movements. Nevertheless, he dreamed big and left notes to inform future performances by a full orchestra.

Two hundred and forty years later, renowned early music specialist and viola player Emilio Moreno gets his hands on the original score and recreates it as Boccherini had envisioned. Moreno is a member of the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century and with conductor Marc Destrubé they have brought a new sunbeam into the world.

To say these symphonies are pure delight is underselling them. Even the movements in a minor or historically sad key signature somehow contrive to sound cheerful. Each symphony is quite short when we consider how much the genre expanded in the subsequent 200 years. But I can just imagine Don Luis de Borbon sitting down to listen to his in-house string quartet perform one of these delights in between banquets, dancing and discussions of his latest commissions.

Boccherini was a prolific composer and with almost 600 works to his name, it can be hard to know where to start. All I can say is that these recordings would be a perfect place to start, or finish, or if you’re in the middle of your musical journey they will springboard you into a new appreciation of his compositional prowess.