Continuing in its aim to fill overlooked niches in the recorded classical repertory, the CPO record label presents three symphonies by Paul Wranitzky performed by the Munich Radio Orchestra under the direction of Howard Griffiths. Born in 1756 in Neureisch, Moravia, Paul Wranitzky was almost exactly eleven months younger than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whom he survived by seventeen years. Unlike the prodigiousness of Mozart, Wranitzky only became a composer after a circuitous route and had to learn much of what came so naturally to the child genius. He applied this approach with great ingenuity, however, as his four dozen symphonies alone reveal. Their style suggests they serve more as a missing link between his teacher, Joseph Haydn, and the “man of the future” – Ludwig van Beethoven. The three symphonies published as Opus 35 in April 1800, though composed in the previous decade, are musically progressive and full of formal surprises.