MOZART 111 combines the best of the Austrian master's music with the best of Deutsche Grammophon's Mozart recordings, bringing together a total of 111 works, while retaining, as far as possible, the original album releases with their cover art. There's enough of everything here to stock a shop, as they say, in performances that have stood the test of time and performances that make you sit up and listen to Mozart afresh the perfect way to discover, rediscover and savor the incomparable genius of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Joseph Kerman was a leading musicologist, music critic, and music educator from the 1950s to the 2000s. He reshaped our understanding and appreciation of Western classical music with his first book, Opera as Drama (1956), to his last, Opera and the Morbidity of Music (2008), including his studies on Bach, Beethoven, William Byrd, concertos, and more. He was a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, where he served two terms as chair of the Music Department. He wrote Listen together with his wife, Vivian Kerman.
Now many of the world’s most serious and significant pianists (Schnabel, Serkin, Brendel, Goode, etc.) have devoted a great deal of thoughtful study to the Beethoven sonatas; in general, performance of this music represents a level of erudition and deep contemplation probably unequaled by the works of any other mainstream composer. Serious pianists study every aspect of these works in minute detail; virtually everything is taken into account except those instruments which inspired Beethoven, and which he had in mind when he composed.
Keyboard arrangements of Mozart's compositions, ranging from one of his earliest minuets to his tribute to J.S. Bach, reveal the variety and fecundity of his imagination, not least in the inspired collection made by the great pianist Edwin Fischer, and in the excerpts from the playful Londoner Skizzenbuch. They are performed on two original and newly restored instruments, the Tangentenflügel - a transitional keyboard instrument with a unique tone quality that sounds like a harpsichord endowed with dynamics - and the pantalon square piano. This is the first recording ever made of a historical pantalon.
This 55-CD set chronicles the remarkable Archiv label, begun in 1947. Devoted mainly to early and Baroque music, the recordings presented here, in facsimiles of their original sleeves (a nice touch), cover the period from Gregorian chant to Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth symphonies, played on period instruments. There are stops in between for a great deal of Bach, music of the Gothic era, the French Baroque (Mouret, Delalande, Rameau, etc), Gibbons, Handel (Alcina, La Resurrezione, Messiah, Italian cantatas), Telemann, Zelenka, Gabrieli, Desprez, Haydn, LeJeune, and plenty of the usual, as well as unusual, suspects. There’s also a final CD with selections of new releases (more Handel, Cavalli, Gesualdo, Vivaldi).
This may well be the most fantastic recording I’ve ever heard of Mozart’s two piano quartets, and coming from someone who prefers his Mozart on modern instruments and has railed regularly against period instruments in music of this vintage, this is beyond high praise; it borders on glorification. Both the Quatuor Festetics, which began as a Read more Sturm und Drang of the G-Minor Quartet’s resolute and deeply tragic first movement. The instrument, of course, postdates though not by much the year in which the piece was written.