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Mozart’s string quintets represent "some of his most sophisticated musical thinking … wonderful music, exhilarating to hear” (from the liner notes by Eric Bromberger). With this three album set, the Alexander String Quartet and Paul Yarbrough complete their Mozart compendium.

"Haydn’s 104 symphonies are all fantastic, original, full of incredible fantasy, and careful work brings out the true radicalism of this writing," explained Douglas Boyd, a formidable pioneer. Commissioned in 1785 by the Count of Ogny for the prestigious Concert of the Parisian Olympic Lodge, Symphony n° 87 is one of six so-called “Parisian” symphonies that Haydn composed far from Paris, in the Hungarian Palace of Esterháza (which however is proud of a sumptuous French garden). It was there too that he composed Il Mondo della Luna, an opera-bouffe inspired by Goldoni. Later, the Symphonie concertante belongs to the master's London period and will be celebrated by a dazzled critic from its premiere across the Channel.

Beethoven’s final symphony was also the first in the history of music to go beyond the scope of purely instrumental music and open itself up to the human voice. Conceived in several stages between 1817 and 1824, his D minor Symphony op.125 enlists the services of a choir and four vocal soloists in its final movement, effectively becoming a cantata. With its setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy from 1785, it conjures up a dream of humans coexisting in peace – assuming that foes can become brothers. Beethoven’s own contemporaries believed that his Ninth Symphony represented the ne plus ultra of symphonic music and that the genre’s traditional parameters had been definitively exhausted with this work, whereas in fact the Ninth marks the beginning of a new symphonic age, providing the impetus for a whole series of unorthodox successors from Berlioz and Liszt to Mahler and Shostakovich.

Celebrated pianist and renowned Beethoven specialist Rudolf Buchbinder will release his first album on Deutsche Grammophon. The collaboration sees him record not only his own new interpretation of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations but to commission 12 new variations himself, echoing the original story where in 1819 music publisher and composer Anton Diabelli wrote a 32-bar German Dance – a forerunner of the waltz – and sent it to more than 50 Austrian composers, asking each of them to write a variation on his original theme.

Mozart composed some fifty symphonies, if we include works he adapted from opera overtures or serenades by adding movements or taking them away. The first dates from 1764-5, at the time of his childhood visit to London, and most are early works, quite short. Many are associated with his boyhood travels (his first trip to Italy in 1769-71, for instance) but his most prolific period as a symphonist was between 1771 and 1774 when, in Salzburg, he wrote no fewer than seventeen.