Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

In cooperation with the International Mozarteum Foundation belvedere is publishing highlights of the Mozart Week from first beginnings until today. Contemporary history and the history of interpretation become audible on carefully restored sound documents in excellent sound quality. Moreover, the edition will also comprise current recordings from the Mozart Week and concerts throughout the season, using the most up-to-date recording and production techniques. The Mozart Week has taken place annually in Salzburg since 1956. Renowned artists have made their mark on this festival since its beginnings and created a distinct impact as regards interpretation, artistic analysis and musical performance. Concerts of the Mozart Week have been recorded on radio and television since the inauguration of the festival. The treasures in the archives of these concert recordings are now being reissued. The album "Wilhelm Backhaus plays Mozart" contains a recording of the pianist's recital from 1956, the 200th anniversary of Mozart's birth and also the year when the Mozart Week was founded, and recordings from the recital in 1967. It offers an interesting opportunity to compare Backhaus's interpretations and the implicit relationships Mozart's compositions. Wolfgang Schaufler writes: "We have to bear in mind that Backhaus worked closely with Hans Richter who conducted the first performances of some works by Brahms."

Classical Music

Classical Music

Mozart’s Requiem may have been written under strange circumstances in the final months of the composer’s life, but the work itself is timeless. Mariss Jansons and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus give a powerful and poignant performance of Mozart’s masterpiece with an impressive group of solo singers, in a concert recorded live in Munich in May 2017. Even its composer’s death could not halt the success of Mozart’s Requiem. Although left incomplete on his death in December 1791, having been anonymously commissioned, the Requiem was completed by a pupil of Mozart’s, Franz Xaver Süssmayr. By the time it was premiered in 1793, it was already a famous work, shrouded in mystery. But even more mysterious than the story behind it is the magisterial quality of Mozart’s writing, from the ferocity of the Dies irae to the otherworldly grace of the Lacrimosa. Genia Kühmeier, Elisabeth Kulman, Mark Padmore and Adam Plachetka are the world-class soloists joining Jansons and his orchestra and chorus. Padmore was Artist in Residence with the orchestra for the 2016/17 season and his rapport with the orchestra is evident. His ringing, distinctive tenor voice is well matched, too, to Jansons’s eloquent and subtle interpretation. “For him it is not about rhetoric, but more about transcendence,” wrote Süddeutsche Zeitung of Jansons’s conducting – suggesting a transcendent faith in humanity, even in the face of death.

The Budapest Trio was founded in 1980 by the Hungarian Ferenc Kiss, leader of the State Philharmonic of Rhineland-Palatinate, and soon gained international renowned. The violinist's partners, violist Tivadar Popa (also from Hungary) and cellist Peter Wopke, are themselves renowned soloists like Kiss. The three musicians are particularly interested in contemporary music; many works have been dedicated to them. Ferenc Kiss plays an Andrea Guarneri from 1671; Popa plays a Pressenda viola from 1831 and Wopke plays a Grancino cello from 1699. On this release, they present works by Mozart- the Divertimento No. 1 in B flat Major K 229, the Flute Quartet in D Major K 285, the Divertimento in E flat Major K 563, which Alfred Einstein called "The most accomplished and finest work which has ever been heard in this world."

The concert that brought together Peter Schreier, the leading Mozart tenor of the 1970s from Dresden, and Erik Werba, the Vienna-born doyen of lied accompanists on 25 January 1978 featured 17 songs, the cantata with piano accompaniment “Die ihr des unermesslichen Weltalls Schöpfer ehrt” K619 from the final year of Mozart’s life, as well as two encore pieces. Schreier and Werba obviously intended to present Mozart’s entire lied repertoire, except for those songs whose texts were too obviously written from the perspective of a female protagonist. From today’s perspective the interpretation of the Mozart songs in this recital is remarkably homogeneous. For Peter Schreier, the opera singer, Mozart was the first true romantic composer. The songs are presented in a deeply emotional, but never sentimental manner. The chosen tempos are therefore rather on the slow side of the spectrum and here as well as in the ballad-like song “Das Veilchen” K476, Schreier makes it apparent how he reads Mozart’s mature, through-composed songs as text based and text centered, as if they were foreshadowing Schubert, Schumann and Brahms.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music