Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

If you listen carefully to this CD, you will get to know one of the best composers in the world. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart lived 250 years ago but he carries on being famous – so he must have been special. He giggled a lot. He was also good at playing the piano and the violin. And he wrote this amazing music, which people still love hearing today. See if you love hearing it too!

“Michael Spyres has a lovely, liquid tenor, all honey for love duets and some metal for cries of outraged honor.” John Yohalem, from Opera Today

You may well be hard-pressed to name a classic opera that lacks a love-story – or a tenor as the main romantic hero. Accordingly, emerging American tenor Michael Spyres has come up with a fresh and fascinating pretext for A Fool for Love: his new collection of tenor arias on Delos.

Michael has carefully selected thirteen mostly well-known arias by composers ranging from Mozart to Stravinsky, encompassing a staggering array of love-related circumstances and emotions. He then sequenced them so as to tell the love-story of a single romantic protagonist. The album’s booklet contains a two-act “plot synopsis,” in which each segment of our hero’s story is indexed to the corresponding aria.

As Michael puts it in his booklet introduction, “What I seek to present to you in this album is a fanciful musical story of a typical war-torn couple, and their struggle to cope with the raptures and ravages of this intangible enigma called love.”

Michael, a Missouri native, completed his studies at the Vienna Conservatory, and is already well-known to European audiences for his critically-acclaimed work in recital, oratorio, and opera. He has appeared at such distinguished houses as Milan’s La Scala and Deutsche Oper Berlin, and worked with conductors like Ricardo Muti and John Eliot Gardner.

Blessed with a supremely versatile instrument, Michael has successfully performed the music of composers from Bach to Wagner, encompassing music of many periods and styles: Baroque, Classical, Bel Canto, and Verismo. He has recorded Rossini’s La Gazzetta, Otello, and Le Siège de Corinthe for Naxos.

Recorded in 1994

The Chiaroscuro Quartet was founded in 2005 by four students from the Royal College of Music in London headed by violinist Alina Ibragimova. Its repertoire focuses primarily on the classical period of Haydn to Schubert, on period instruments and bows.

In 1961, the visiting orchestra to Salzburg was the Dresden Staatskapelle. The 'magic harp', as it was known, certainly justified its reputation under Franz Konwitschny, who confirmed his own standing as one of the leading representatives of the traditionally 'heavy' style of music-making in the German Classical and Romantic repertory.

Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony was notable for its powerful contrast between darker and lighter orchestral sonorities, and much the same was true of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in A major K 488, in which the soloist was no less a luminary than Friedrich Gulda, whose playing was remarkable for its subtly contoured interaction with the orchestra but who was also able to bring to the piece a note of virtuosity and, in the Adagio, an overriding calm.

The Staatskapelle’s concert under Konwitschny ended with Strauss’s 'Sinfonia domestica': a vast portrait of the Strauss family drawing on the orchestra’s full palette of tone colours.

It is rare to find a soloist doubling as a conductor in Salzburg, but when it happens, it is undoubtedly a delightful prospect for the Festival audience. This was a risk that Alexander Lonquich took with the Mozarteum Orchestra in 2009. His Mozart Matinee began with the 'Six German Dances' K 571 and revealed Lonquich and the orchestra as knowledgeable champions of a rhythmically alert and dynamically varied Mozart style. Their ability to breathe new life into the music also benefitted the 'Linz' Symphony in C major K 425, while the 'Masonic Funeral Music' in C minor K 477 proved to be a moment of intense stasis in the concert, which was brought to a brilliant end with the Piano Concerto in E flat major K

482, conducted by Lonquich from the keyboard.

Mozart stands at the head of the classical music canon. His simple and delicate style conveys emotion with an artistic sensitivity that has never been matched. This Rough Guide presents a perfectly balanced selection of some of the composer’s most beautiful works.

Bonus CD: Salomon Quartet with Simon Whistler (viola): Mozart String Quintets

Mozart’s string quintets are legendary and swing from incredibly delicate textures in the slow movements to humble dance themes in the minuets to majestic episodes of symphonic grandeur.