MOZART: Violin Sonatas, Vol. 4

Classical Music

Mozart: Violin Concertos Nos. 3 and 5

MOZART: Serenades K. 185 and K. 203

MOZART: Symphonies Nos. 25, 32 and 41

MOZART: Salzburg Symphonies

MOZART: Clarinet Quintets

Mozart: Serenade No. 10 in B-Flat Major, K. 361 "Gran Partit

Eine kleine Nachtmusik, the Serenada in G, K 525, comes from a later period of Mozart's life. In 1781 Mozart, who had returned from Mannheim and Paris to the service of the Archbishop of Salzburg, accompanied his patron on a visit to the Imperial capital, Vienna. There he finally broke with his employer and secured his dismissal from the archiepiscopal court. In Vienna there seemed every opportunity, which it seemed his patron was deliberately preventing him from seizing. The last ten years of Mozart's life were spent in Vienna, without the presence of his father to guide him and without the kind of secure patronage that he had hoped to gain at court. An imprudent marriage brought it's own difficulties, but Mozart, nevertheless, won some immediate acclaim, both in the theatre and as a performer on the fortepiano, popularity which waned, but had begun to revive at the time of his sudden death in December, 1791. Eine kleine Nachtmusik was written in August, 1787, a few months after the death of Leopold Mozart in Salzburg, while Mozart was preparing his new opera, Don Giovanni, for performance in Prague The occasion of it's composition is unknown, but the work would have been suitable for domestic performance. Originally including a first Minuet, now lost, the Serenade opens with music as lucid and cheerful as anything Mozart wrote, followed by a Romance of charm and ingenuity, a spry Minuet and a final Rondo, a conclusion to the remarkable series of Serenades and Divertimenti on which Mozart had embarked twenty years before, as a ten-year-old.

Mozart: Piano Concertos Nos. 12, 14 and 21

Mozart: Piano Concertos Nos. 1, 2, 3 and 4

Constanze Mozart was later to claim that her husband had a premonition that the Requiem was an omen of his own coming death, a suggestion to which one may attach little credence, however attractive the story may appear to the romantic imagination. Mozart seemed, in the summer of 1791, very much more cheerful than he had been, since his fortunes had taken an obvious turn for the better. In November, however, he was taken ill and within a fortnight he was dead, his death ascribed by his doctor to military fever, but the subject of much subsequent speculation. On 4th December he felt well enough to sing with his friends parts of the Requiem, which was still incomplete. Benedikt Schack, Tamino in Die Zauberfl�te, sang the soprano part in falsetto, Mozart sang alto, the violinist Hofer, husband of Constanze's sister Josefa, Queen of the Night, sang tenor and Franz Gerl, whose wife played Papagena, while he took the part of Sarastro, sang bass. It is said that Mozart burst into tears and could go no further when it came to the Lacrimosa, of which, incidentally, he had written on I y the first eight bars. This was in the afternoon. In the evening his condition worsened and he died at five minutes to one on the morning of 5th December, to be buried a day or so later in an unmarked grave. Mozart had completed the composition and scoring of the Introit and Kyrie, used by S�ssmayer for the final Communion, Lux aeterna. The great Sequence, the Dies Irae, was sketched fairly fully up to the verse Lacrimosa, dies illa, a point at which Eybler too gave up his tentative work on the score. S�ssmayer continued the Lacrimosa for a further 22 bars, completing it. Mozart had written the voice parts and bass of the Offertory, as he had for much of the Dies Irae, and this S�ssmayer completed. Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei are the work of S�ssmayer. The Czech conductor Zdenek Kosler studied under Karel Ancerl at the Prague Academy of Arts, and distinguished himself early in his career at the Besan�on Conductors' Competition and in the Dimitri Mitropoulos Competition in New York. The first prize in the second of these enabled him to work as assistant-conductor with Leonard Bernstein for one year.

MOZART: Symphonies Nos. 29, 30 and 38

Mozart: Piano Concertos Nos. 11 and 22

Mozart: Piano Concertos Nos. 17 and 18