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Under the direction of the principal conductor and artistic director of the Salzburg Mozart Week, Mark Minkowski, the Musiciens du Louvre perform on two of Mozart’s original instruments. Mozart’s Violin Concerto and his Piano Concerto in A major are played on instruments that were once in the composer’s possession. Thibault Noally plays the Violin Concerto on a violin from the workshop of Pietro Antonio Dalla Costa and “conjures up Romantic brilliance from the well maintained instrument”, then Francesco Corti brings Mozart’s fortepiano to life again, thereby spreading “collective Mozart happiness all round” (Salzburger Nachrichten).

This highly collectable boxed set assembles all the works which Mozart composed for violin and orchestra, performed by the much-acclaimed violinist Julia Fischer in impeccable readings. The set includes 3 SACDs along with an added DVD which includes previously unreleased video footage of the Mozart recording sessions. All of these Mozart recordings featuring the remarkable young violinist Julia Fischer have been favorably reviewed on this site and elsewhere.

Deutsche Grammophon is releasing 16 new e-albums comprising Claudio Abbado’s Complete Recordings on the Yellow Label – the legacy of a legend. Together these digital releases include over 250 hours of first-rate recordings and feature an A-Z of composers. Volume 9 in the series presents a comprehensive set of Abbado’s Mozart interpretations.

Herbert von Karajan was an Austrian conductor. He was principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic for 34 years. During the Nazi era, he debuted at the Salzburg Festival, with the Vienna Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic, and during World War II he conducted at the Berlin State Opera. Generally regarded as one of the greatest conductors of the 20th century, he was a controversial but dominant figure in European classical music from the mid-1950s until his death. Part of the reason for this was the large number of recordings he made and their prominence during his lifetime. By one estimate, he was the top-selling classical music recording artist of all time, having sold an estimated 200 million records.

This is set of records of violin virtuoso Jascha Heifetz, one of the best violinists ever. It was originally issued in seventies on vinyl and it is mono. As you can read in the booklet. "The selections on these compact disks were recorded before noise-reduction methods were available. In the digital remastering, effort was made to minimize the inherent noise; radical methods were not used in order to preserve the full-frequency content of the original recordings. Therefore, some noise may be experienced in reproduction on wide-range equipment".