The virtuoso lutenist Silvius Leopold Weiss spent almost his entire life in the service of royalty and the aristocracy. He made his debut as a musician at the age of seven before Emperor Leopold I, and served Count Palatine Karl Philip von Neuburg and Prince Alexander Sobieski before joining the Saxon court orchestra in Dresden in 1718. In his own time he was hailed as the greatest lutenist and lute composer in Europe.

Weiss composed the largest surviving corpus of solo lute music in the history of the instrument, and it is for this excellent body of work that he is known to connoisseurs of the lute today. Yet he also wrote a large amount for ensemble with lute – a repertory that is currently far less familiar than his solo works. Richard Stone has established that nineteen concerted works by Weiss survive, and that several more – perhaps dozens – have been lost. These comprise duets (for two lutes, or lute and flute), trios and concerti featuring the lute as the solo instrument.

Whilst Weiss uses types of figures characteristic of the time in these concertos, the phrases are not clichéd nor overly predictable, and many passages feature affecting melodies akin to those we know from his finest solo lute works. From these convincing reconstructions and our new knowledge that there were yet more Weiss concertos, it is apparent that only their incomplete nature prevents Weiss from being recognised as a major composer in the late baroque concerto genre.