Mozart Complete Works

Mozart Edition: The Complete Works will make a great gift this Holiday season for the music lover in your life or someone who is hard to buy for. This collection contains 170 discs of completed works by Mozart in one beautiful package. Also included is a cd-rom containing essays on his works, artist bio's, text and libretti's. All music lovers will enjoy the Symphonies - Concertos - Serenades - Divertimenti - Dances - Chamber Music - Church Sonatas - String Ensembles - Violin Sonatas - Keyboard Works - Sacred Works - Concert Arias - Songs - Canons and Operas in this collection.

The contents of the EMI box are too numerous to list but all the sonatas, variations, and most short pieces are here: absent is the London Sketchbook, which is trite juvenalia.

Volume 4 of the complete survey of Mozart's Piano Concertos undertaken by Naxos in the late 1980s and early 1990s contains two of his most-loved works, masterpieces both. This particular CD was recorded in the Italian Institute in Budapest and produced by Ibolya Tóth (her recordings are almost always entirely splendid) in October 1989. Piano Concerto No.23 in A major, K488 is often regarded as one of Mozart's sunniest compositions, but the central Adagio is deep and complex, and the piano part is equally balanced with the orchestra, making the Concerto work on several levels.

The quality of the recorded sound is so perfectly clear on this recording, like finely etched crystal, while at the same time it is so robust and resonant, that it is difficult to believe that the piano played on these two marvelous CDs is a replica of a 1785 Walter fortepiano, a smaller and much more fragile instrument than today's modern concert grand pianos.