Mozart Complete

This series of performances dates from between 1966 (when the six quartets Nos. 14-19 dedicated to Haydn were recorded) to 1973 and was rightly saluted on its completion as a fine achievement. The playing of the Quartetto Italiano has a freshness, range and subtlety that vividly realizes the music in all its variety, while technical problems seem to have been solved so that the music-making can be both spontaneous-sounding and thoughtful throughout.

This is the kind of package which represents the best of the Philips Classics Duo series. Slightly older recordings, but in beautiful, clear, warm analogue sound; artists of the old school and the first rank; a compilation of potentially neglected music made available absurdly cheaply in attractive packaging with high production values and intelligent notes; what's not to like?

We bundled the eight Mozart cds that Rachel Podger and Gary Cooper recorded over the last ten years into an atrractive box, with an informative note from producer Jonathan Freeman-Attwoord. The duo partnership Gary Cooper and Rachel Podger has taken them worldwide. These recordings of Mozarts Complete Sonatas for Keyboard & Violin have received countless awards and accolades, including multiple Diapason dOr awards and Gramophone Editors Choices, and hailed as benchmark recordings.

Anima Eterna Brugge, founded by Jos Van Immerseel in 1987, is a period-instrument orchestra based in Bruges. The size of the ensemble varies from seven to eighty musicians, depending on the programme. Its repertory ranges from Monteverdi to Gershwin.

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.

Elisabeth Leonskaja is one of the most celebrated pianists of our time, remaining true to herself and to her music, and in doing so, is following in the footsteps of the great Russian musicians of the Soviet era, such as Sviatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels."A kaleidoscopic Mozart with a lifetime's wisdom and experience behind it" according to The Arts Desk after a Wigmore Hall concert.

This issue completes Cooper’s and Podger’s collected recordings of Mozart’s music for keyboard and violin. At first sight, Volumes 7 and 8 might seem to consist of leftovers – Vol 8 devoted to a set of six sonatas (K10-15) written in London when Mozart was eight, and Vol 7, apart from the two variation sets composed shortly after he settled in Vienna, containing a sonata dating from his 1766 stay in The Hague, plus two fragments, completed after Mozart’s death by Maximilian Stadler. In the event, however, both CDs are full of interest.

Recorded between 1989 and 2004, the Hagen Quartet's recordings of Mozart's complete music for string quartet is clearly the finest set of the works released in the early digital age. For one thing, because the collection includes not only the 23 canonical string quartets but also the three early Divertimenti for string quartet, the five Fugues from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier arranged by Mozart, and the late Adagio and Fugue in C minor, their set really is the complete music for string quartet.