Mozart: A Life

After Mozart, the 2001 Grammy winner for Best Small Ensemble Performance, by Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica, brings together the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (and his father, Leopold), with three contemporary works inspired by him. The works included, by contemporary Eastern European composers such as Alexander Raskatov, Valentin Silvestrov and Alfred Schnittke, invoke Mozart’s memory in ways direct and more subtle, and the more familiar Mozart pieces sandwiched in serve to bring the listener to a new way of hearing the more familiar pieces. The disc is an attempt, in Kremer’s words, to “set Mozart in the frame of our own time”.