Mozart Symphony No. 19

Matthias Bamert’s Contemporaries of Mozart project is one of Chandos’ longest-running and most successful recording series. Mozart’s unquestionable genius has tended to eclipse the work of many otherwise excellent composers who were writing at the same time as he. Often successful in their day, many of these composers fell into neglect over subsequent decades and were in some cases almost forgotten.

"The Austrian conductor Karl Böhm is one of the towering conductors of the 20th Century. As the embodiment of the long Austro-German musical tradition, he helped to write musical history. This 19-CD set assembles all the extant recordings he conducted for EMI (notably its German Electrola label) over the period 1935 to 1949 in Dresden, Berlin, Vienna and London includes a number of rarities and the world premiere release of a version of Mozart’s Serenata notturna recorded in Vienna in 1947. It was during these years that Böhm cemented his reputation as a major conductor of Austro-German repertoire. Collectors will also be pleased to know that this set contains all the recordings that featured in the now-iconic series of Dresden-themed LP boxes released by EMI to mark Böhm’s 85th birthday in 1979. "

Born on 15 April 1924 in Lincoln, Sir Neville Marriner studied at the Royal College of Music and the Paris Conservatoire. He began his career as a violinist, playing first in a string quartet and trio, then in the London Symphony Orchestra. It was during this period that he founded the Academy, with the aim of forming a top-class chamber ensemble from London’s finest players. Beginning as a group of friends who gathered to rehearse in Sir Neville’s front room, the Academy gave its first performance in its namesake church in 1959. The Academy now enjoys one of the largest discographies of any chamber orchestra worldwide, and its partnership with Sir Neville Marriner is the most recorded of any orchestra and conductor.

L'Oiseau Lyre's Mozart: The Symphonies, performed by the Academy of Ancient Music under Christopher Hogwood, is the ne plus ultra of Mozart symphony sets. Many "complete" collections of this cycle omit Symphony No. 37 as the better part of it is composed not by Mozart but by Michael Haydn as the result of a backroom trade of compositions between the two old friends. Most do not address the Mozart symphonies that are considered doubtful or that fall outside the accepted canon of Numbers 1-41, and few more contain orchestral Mozart works related to his symphonic output but are technically not symphonies.

Mozart and his family spent 15 months in London when the composer was eight years old. In London he wrote his first symphonies and first vocal works, serving major notice to the world. Those have been recorded before and are included here, but what's novel is the inclusion of music by other composers whom Mozart would have heard in London. Many of the works here receive their premiere recordings, and The Mozartists and conductor Ian Page ably sketch the influences they likely had on Mozart. Some of the influences from J.C. Bach have been recognized before, but Page goes more deeply into them: you can hear Mozart's way of assigning expressive meaning to transitional passagework, uncanny already at age eight, in the music of the "London Bach.

The Szell/Cleveland Recordings Complete! In the heyday of George Szell s tenure as its chief conductor, declared Gramophone, The Cleveland Orchestra had few if any peers among the world s great orchestras. Coinciding with the orchestra s centenary in 2018, Sony Classical is excited to announce one of the most ambitious reissue projects of recent times, a comprehensive collection of the Clevelanders recordings made under the baton of their iconic fourth music director.