Turca

Various Artists - 101 Mozart (2016) {6CD Box Set Decca 478 2963 rel 2011}
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© 2011, 2016 Decca Music | 478 2963
Classical / Viennese School

This SIX CD collection of 101 favorite tracks is the perfect introduction to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, one of the greatest and most popular composers of all time. With a running time of well over 7 ½ hours of music this box set provides unbeatable value for money. The comprehensive collection covers every aspect of this popular composers music best-loved arias from his operas and highlights from the sacred choral works rub shoulders with favorite moments from his symphonies, concertos, serenades, sonatas and chamber music. Includes recordings by some of the greatest exponents of this repertoire in the Decca catalogue, including artists such as Mitsuko Uchida, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Sir Colin Davis, Joshua Bell, Sir Neville Marriner and Sir Georg Solti.

This Decca 2CD set of Beethoven and Mozart recordings, issued along with a companion box that contains the other four Beethoven piano concertos (240 822-2), makes an apt memorial tribute to a pianist who stands as one of the ‘Great Pianists of the Century’. Katchen quite properly features in the distinguished series of recordings marketed by Universal under that title. His achievement might have been greater still but for the cancer claimed him in 1969 at the tragically early age of forty-two.

Valery Afanassiev on “WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART” Today we are too fond of clear-cut solutions and exhaustive explanations. Writers and film directors are supposed to shed light even on those nooks and crannies which should remain dark for the sake of perspective. And readers as well as cinema goers should remain in the dark about this and that for the sake of the same perspective, the same space, the same labyrinth. Alas, there are no more dark ladies either in sonnets or in novels. We have forgotten the aroma of unanswerable questions. And yet every masterpiece is an unanswerable question. And so is every artist of genius. In Pushkin's short tragedy Mozart and Salieri there are many unanswerable questions. Actually it ends with such a question: 'Is an evil deed compatible with genius?' (Gesualdo, who was unquestionably a composer of genius, killed his wife. But does this murder answer the question?)

While its unpretentious cover photo and small text don't proclaim it as an important recording, Noriko Ogawa's 2012 SACD of Mozart piano sonatas is the kind of sleeper album that quietly asserts its value and convinces purely through the beauty of the music. The three piano sonatas presented here also have that kind of unassuming quality. Mozart composed them as teaching pieces, suitable for players of modest skills, yet they have become extremely popular and rank among his best loved works. Ogawa plays them with a light touch that suits their simplicity, and her interpretations of K. 330, K. 331 (famous for its Rondo alla Turca), and K. 332 are transparent and almost naïve, but for the subtlety of attack, balanced phrasing, and shaded dynamics that reveal her artistry. BIS provides nearly ideal sound quality for Ogawa, offering clean reproduction and reasonably close microphone placement that make listening effortless.

The reissue of keyboardist Claude Bolling's recordings of the 1960s may prompt a positive reevaluation of his contributions. Bolling has been known, at least outside France, mostly for the flute-and-piano works he composed for Jean-Pierre Rampal; his recordings with Rampal hit a certain popular groove and stuck with the formula. They were undeniably appealing in a simple way, but they became fatally overexposed. Bolling's earlier recordings reveal more imagination in his treatment of the relationship between jazz and classical music. Take for example this 1965 album, recorded in Paris. It's one of the few successful jazz treatments of Mozart, who is notoriously resistant to jazz treatment. The difficulty comes as a result of Mozart's reliance on harmonic rhythm, or the speed of the rate of change of the harmonies in the music. This feature seems impossible to capture in jazz, which heavily relies on regular chord changes, but Bolling's solutions here, making use of a classic jazz sextet, are brilliantly imaginative.

Elisabeth Leonskaja is a Soviet and Austrian pianist. She was trained in the Russian school of piano. She made an international career after she won the Enesco International Piano Competition in Bucharest in 1964, and has lived in Vienna since 1978.

Franz Liszt - Liszt at the Theatre - Leslie Howard (1992) {Hyperion CDA66575}
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© 1992 Hyperion Records | CDA66575
Classical / Solo Piano

Whilst Liszt’s piano music derived from music for plays is a much smaller body of work than his catalogue of operatic pieces, the approach in his methods of composition, elaboration and transcription remains broadly the same. As far as present Liszt scholarship permits one ever to be categorical, this recording contains all of Liszt’s works in this genre.

Sonatas 7 - 12, composed between 1777 and about 1783, mark a significant evolution with respect to the preceding ones: Mozart’s expressive world now takes on many new facets, and in Sonata K 310 it reaches dramatic depths of unprecedented intensity and sombreness. In the other sonatas, too, although seemingly “lighter”, we find an infinity of expressive approaches that had never previously appeared with such naturalness and variety of inflections. However, Mozart always succeeds in maintaining an admirable balance between seriousness and facetiousness, between playfulness and drama, with constant originality in his management of form.