Mozart Kraus

Joseph Martin Kraus, regarded in his lifetime (1756–1792) as one of the world’s six most formidable composers, has like many other contemporaries since languished in the historical shadow of Mozart. Kraus was hailed by none other than Joseph Haydn as Mozart’s equal in terms of creativity and genius but had a career more like Haydn’s and was more of a polymath. Born in central Germany, he studied composition in Mannheim, Mainz, Erfurt and Göttingen. In 1778 he decided on a career in music and emigrated to Sweden, where he became Vice-Kapellmeister at the court of Gustav III in 1781 and Kapellmeister in Stockholm in 1788.

An almost exact contemporary of Mozart, Kraus spent his career in Sweden, where he composed prolifically in all forms, with a focus on Swedish opera. Kraus’s German songs reflect his interest both in the Lied and German poetry of the Enlightenment, particularly the popular work of Matthias Claudius.

Six ans après le premier, un nouveau lot de six concertos, où tarte à la crème du "divin Mozart" ne résiste pas aux assauts de solistes et d'orchestres allumés. Six raretés, par ailleurs.

This is a nearly complete recording of Mozart's solo keyboard music, including an entire disc of small variation sets and the like but omitting the incomplete but fascinating Piano Sonata in F major, K. 533. That work is often completed with the similar-in-spirit Rondo in F major, K. 494, but perhaps that was less settled in 1954, when Lili Kraus made these recordings. It's too bad, because one wonders what her interpretation of K. 533 would have been like – in many of Mozart's sonatas, Kraus creates a sharp differentiation between tuneful music and scalar or arpeggiated passagework, but that highly contrapuntal sonata is in a class by itself and doesn't structurally revolve around that distinction.

A pianist whose work transcended time, Lili Kraus was a Hungarian musician with a love for Viennese classics. Kraus made a career from an early age, performing internationally from the age of 18 and becoming a professor at age 20. She was not only a great solo artist, but was a renowned collaborator. As described in Gramophone, ""Her superb playing in various violin sonatas by Beethoven and Mozart set standards that have not been matched since the 1930's.

This new release features the first-ever commercial recording of three newly discovered viola concertos by German-born Swedish composer Joseph Martin Kraus. Joseph Martin Kraus was one of the most innovative composers of his time. With Mozart, he was described by Haydn as one of only two geniuses he knew. Recipient of the 2011 Leonard Bernstein Award and of the 2010 Avery Fisher Career Grant, David Aaron Carpenter has emerged as one of the world's most promising young artists. The Philadelphia Inquirer describes him as being “in a league with the best.”

Joseph Martin Kraus, the German-born Swedish composer who was an almost exact contemporary of Mozart, is primarily known as a late classical symphonist of extraordinary importance, and heretofore this is where recording of his output has been concentrated. On Bis' Joseph Martin Kraus: The Complete Piano Music, pianist Ronald Brautigam comes to terms with the slim amount of keyboard music that belongs to Kraus, a cycle previously addressed on Naxos by pianist Jacques Després on a modern instrument. On the Bis, Brautigam uses a reproduced Walther & Sohn fortepiano built by Paul McNulty, an 1802 instrument that has a sound almost indistinguishable from that of a modern piano, except for its more limited range and shorter decay time. This seems to suit Kraus' keyboard music, which is rich in ideas but spindly in texture, a bit better than a modern instrument. Likewise, Després interpretations of Kraus' music sound read through at times and betray a sense of less than complete familiarity. This is not a challenge for Brautigam, who clearly knows, and loves, these willful and eccentric pieces of Kraus.

From the Notes: Both the artists on these discs made their mark early on the musical scene. At the age of 17 Lili Kraus graduated with the highest honours from the Academy of Music in her native Budapest [where Kodály and Bartók had been among her teachers] and went on to study with Schnabel at the Vienna Conservatory, where, only three years later, she was appointed professor. Willi Boskovsky [her junior by four years] at the age of 17 won the Kreisler Prize at the Vienna Academy, where he became professor at 25. He was already a member of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, but in 1939, at the early age of 30, he was appointed one of that prestigious body's concertmasters, and remained in that post for 32 years. … Meanwhile Lili Kraus had toured the world in the early 1930's, gaining a considerable reputation as an interpreter of the Viennese classics from Haydn to Schubert….