Mozart Digital

‘Mozart, You Drive Me Crazy!’ This is the title that the South African soprano Golda Schultz has decided to give to her new album, devoted to the female heroines of Don Giovanni , Così fan tutte and Le nozze di Figaro , roles that have marked her career from Berlin to The Metropolitan Opera: ‘Why does Mozart drive me crazy? First of all, because his music, which sounds so easy when you listen to it, is extremely difficult to perform… And when I immerse myself in the world of Da Ponte and Mozart, I realise that there’s a deep complexity to their female characters: they endure the toughest trials, but they also display great strength. In fact, these operas explore humanity from the feminine perspective: every single one of these women is constantly evolving. They show how human beings transcend trauma and how grief and pain can be overcome.’

"Mozart is a touchstone of the heart. If I want to do something especially dear to someone, I sit down at the piano and play them a piece by Mozart." With these sentences, the great Mozart interpreter Edwin Fischer has said something essential. From every note of Mozart speaks an extremely sensitive and delicate, loving and at the same time masculine powerful character, which expresses itself with inventiveness and a mastery perhaps only comparable to Bach.

"Mozart is a touchstone of the heart. If I want to do something especially dear to someone, I sit down at the piano and play them a piece by Mozart." With these sentences, the great Mozart interpreter Edwin Fischer has said something essential. From every note of Mozart speaks an extremely sensitive and delicate, loving and at the same time masculine powerful character, which expresses itself with inventiveness and a mastery perhaps only comparable to Bach.

A Limited Edition, Original Jackets collection showcasing the artistry of the magnificent American soprano, Kathleen Battle. Kathleen Battle enraptured opera audiences of the 1980s and 1990s. Here was a lyric soprano combining unsurpassable beauty of tone with a keen musical intelligence, a way with words and a communicative warmth that drew listeners to Strauss and spirituals alike. She has the easy phrasing of a great jazz singer combined with the breath, breadth and precise projection of a trained voice.

"Mozart always had a special affinity with wind instruments: for him they were essential components of his musical expression," claims French clarinettist Nicolas Baldeyrou, a globally renowned soloist who has performed with some of the greatest conductors and virtuosi: …

Continuing an old tradition of outdoor music, Mozart raised the serenade genre to an outstanding level of accomplishment. Harmonia mundi’s first collaboration with Enrico Onofri and the Münchener Kammerorchester couples his most famous contributions to the form: Eine kleine nachtmusik, the ‘Posthorn’ Serenade (with its picturesque solo for the eponymous instrument) and the majestic ‘Haffner’ Serenade, with Isabelle Faust as guest star!

The grandeur of Mozart’s Missa solemnis in C minor ‘Waisenhausmesse’ caused Viennese scholars to doubt how it could have been composed by a twelve-year old boy.

While today it is easy to listen to almost any piece at any time and in almost any place, before the invention of the record it was quite complicated: you had to go to a concert or to the opera or you played yourself… In the emerging bourgeoisie, arrangements of the most popular works in instrumentations suitable for chamber music were popular and, of course, Mozart's famous operas were at the top of the popularity scale.

Dissonance Quartet – the name already contains the thrill of transgression. But a dissonance, in which the parts momentarily diverge from triadic harmony, is the necessary condition to achieve an aesthetic of four-part conflict, such as was sought after in the genre of classical string quartet. Mozart’s work in C Major with the “dissonance” epithet is the highlight of a group of six quartets in which he responded to the music of his colleague Joseph Haydn and the latter’s concept of discursive thematic work in a four-part texture.

Having listened for over half a century to tens of thousands of recordings of Mozart’s music, be it piano music, string quartets, symphonies, operas, et al, I have been hugely energized by these recordings. Not because they are so great, but because they are often so terrible!