Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Jan Peerce (1904 - 1984) was one of the great tenors of his age, known particularly for his musicality and light metallic top notes. These recordings of Mozart, Donizetti, Verdi and Bizet date from the early to mid 1950’s.

Also available PR89562 Vol 1 and PR8957 Vol 2

The great soprano Elisabeth Grümmer (1911 - 1986) in recordings of Mozart, Beethoven, Gounod and Tchaikovsky. From recordings dating from between 1949 and 1955.

“An artist one truly feels privileged to have heard.” Alan Blyth

Their performance of Mozart's Oboe Quartet, a highly virtuosic and original work shows a different side to these musicians, highlighting their subtlety and lightness of touch. The arrangement for oboe and violins of three arias from ‘The Magic Flute’ was originally set for two violins, while only the cor anglais part has survived from the Adagio, K580. In addition to the seldom-heard 1902 Serenade by the Hungarian composer Ernst von Dohnányi, Benjamin Britten's ‘Phantasy Quartet’ presents a rhapsodically-toned masterwork for the combination of oboe, violin, viola and cello

“One of the most delicate, sighing, judiciously used women’s voices one might ever hear.” That was the verdict of the tenor Giacomo Lauri-Volpi, writing in his fascinating study of the leading singers of his time, Voci parallele (Bologna ed. 1977). “Licia Albanese,” he says, “would move on stage purposefully, with precision, painting her tones with careful control of her means and a clear perception of their end”. Audiences were captivated by an effect of modesty, simplicity and tenderness but behind that effect was a solid mastery of her art. He, the senior artist, is full of admiration. But he has a warning: we should not suppose that these fixed, fossilised, mummified objects we call records can convey the individuality, the true character of such singers. So: caveat emptor. Lauri-Volpi had his own way of putting things (that adjective ‘sighing’ surprises us, not so much in itself as in its placing, second among the primary characteristics of the singer he is describing, and one may well object that records, however ‘fixed’, can at least sing to us, which is more than fossils and mummies can do). There is still something in what he says. He is thinking of Albanese’s particular kind of art: that delicate, ‘sighing’ quality which he hears inwardly, summoned up in a memory that is visual as well as aural and which is scarcely to be ‘fixed’, held still. Its essence lies in the moving, breathing individual. He speaks of her strong intuitive faculties. She knew what she was going to do next, vocally and dramatically – but what the audience experienced was the sense of an assured spontaneity. In the theatre you felt that her singing and her movements might take any number of forms: in a recording it will always take one. The living being is caught, pinned-down, captured; and that’s not the way she was.

Extract from the booklet note John Steane, 2008

Not long after his February 1934 London Queen’s Hall concert comprising three Mozart concertos, Schnabel made his first recording of a Mozart piano concerto, No. 27 in B flat major, K.595, at the recently opened and well equipped Abbey Road Studios. Completed in one session, this recording is notable not only for the excellence of its sound but for the moulding of the slow movement, taken at a slow tempo, but without any loss of the tension between successive notes or of the coherence of harmonic progressions. Schnabel’s recording of the Concerto for two pianos, with his son Karl Ulrich, is made up entirely of first takes. In the Rondo in A minor, K.511, Schnabel beautifully shapes the phrases and avoids sentimentality or overt intensity of expression.