Mozart; Serenade No. 10 "gran Partita" Schubert; 6 German Dances Orchestrated by Anton Webern

A stunning pairing of Mozart’s glorious ‘Gran Partita’ Serenade with a work written specifically to be performed alongside it, Geysir by the exceptional clarinettist-composer, Mark Simpson. Mark Simpson’s simmering, volcanic Geysir was inspired by the rich opening chord of Mozart’s ‘Gran Partita’, and by its bubbling clarinet writing, which develop into what Simpson describes as a “flurry of colour and harmonic shifts”.

The Serenade No. 10 for winds in B-flat major, K. 361/370a, is a serenade by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart scored for thirteen instruments: twelve winds and string bass. The piece was probably composed in 1781 or 1782 and is often known by the subtitle "Gran Partita", though the title is a misspelling and not in Mozart's hand. It consists of seven movements.

This Collection of Mozart fetaures some of the leading period-instrument ensembles and spans the oeuvre of Mozart's works. Included excellent readings of the 'Prague' Symphony and the Requiem.

With this recital Shai Wosner declares himself a Schubertian of unfaltering authority and character. Entirely modern in style (tonally lean and sharply focused, never given to easy or sentimental options), he relishes every twist and turn in the so-called Reliquie Sonata, with its quasi-orchestral, defiantly unpianistic first movement and its astonishing second movement modulations (Alkan himself never wrote anything more boldly experimental). Unlike Richter in his monolithic recording, Wosner opts for the two completed movements rather than allowing the music to evaporate into thin air, displaying throughout a finely concentrated sense of music that achieves its vision and depth through extreme austerity.

Karl Amadeus Hartmanns work is very difficult to attribute to any particular compositional school. Although he was not a revolutionist in terms of notation or performance forces, he was able to creatively subordinate all the achievements of modern musical language to innovative formal approaches. Hartmann wrote with extraordinary verve, creating artistic phrases with a broad ambitus, at the same time he could masterfully juggle short motifs, subjecting them to elaborate variational and contrapuntal transformations. In terms of harmonics, Hartmanns music is tonal, though strongly chromatic, which deprives the listener of a secure sense of anchoring in a specific key.

This release celebrates and commemorates Yo-Yo Ma's 30 year recording career with Sony Music. Created with the full participation of Yo-Yo Ma, 30 Years Outside the Box, is the definitive collection of this iconic artist. The box set contains every original album Yo-Yo Ma has recorded including 2 discs of rare and never before released material.

Principal players of the London Symphony Orchestra display their virtuosic talents on this album of concertos for wind instruments by Mozart, recorded in concert with conductor Jaime Martín in the excellent acoustic of the Jerwood Hall at LSO St Luke’s.