Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Together with the Requiem, Mozart's C minor mass is one of the brilliant composer's great unfinished sacred works. The work combines monumental power, solemn spirituality and moving solo passages. This recording under the baton of Baroque and Classical expert Raymond Leppard has great expressive depth, and offers a truly legendary vocal ensemble featuring stars like Kiri Te Kanawa and Ileana Cotrubas.

A glittering selection of operatic highlights and arias, featuring great composers and artists who are all celebrating significant anniversaries in 2013.

Herbert von Karajan and Carlo Maria Giulini conduct performances of Mozart’s four great operas, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute and Cosi Fan Tutte. Singers include Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Anna Moffo, Giuseppe Taddei and Joan Sutherland. A 9 CD set in a slim-line wallet box. Super budget price.

SIR JOHN ELIOT GARDINER CELEBRATES HIS 70th BIRTHDAY IN STYLE

30-CD box, in the packaging-style of the Messiaen Edition of 2008: tremendous value for this calibre of recorded material.

Original Jackets

The 108-page booklet includes an extended interview-article (2,500 words) with Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, Principal of the Royal Academy of Music in London, recording producer and trumpet-player.

The truly great DG / Archiv & Philips recordings from across his career, ranging from Monteverdi to Stravinsky via Handel, Bach, Mozart and Verdi.

Released to co-incide with his 70th birthday, several major performances, at least one TV appearance and the publication of his long-awaited book on Bach

One of the great advocates of period-instrument performance he has received more Gramophone awards than any other living artist … and now Sir John Eliot Gardiner is reaching the ripe old age of 70 without any signs of letting up on his almost frenetic life in music.

It’s an overwhelmingly vocal collection, a sequence of highly dramatic musical works that faithfully reflects Gardiner’s musical ideals and predilections. Sung texts and translations will be available as a digital download. The 30-CD box, in the packaging-style of the Messiaen Edition of 2008, presents the recordings in their original jackets, the 108-page booklet includes an extended interview-article with Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, Principal of the Royal Academy of Music in London, recording producer and trumpet-player. As ever with Gardiner, this provides a stimulating account of his life and music, and we plan to make the full interview, conducted earlier this year, available on the special website we are preparing for the occasion.

The birthday itself falls on 20 April 2013. Around it will be a marathon concert in London’s Royal Albert Hall, consisting of all the Bach Passions and Oratorios performed in a single day. Gardiner is also publishing a book on Bach, and there will be TV appearances as well (The Andrew Marr Show in the UK).

The first symphonic work by Mozart that Klemperer ever conducted was K.550. The Kölnische Zeitung noted that his use of a reduced string section emphasised the dark aspects of the score and the work was played ‘con espressione, yet with a translucency and a rhythmic and dynamic finesse in the true classical style’. His 1956 recording of the symphony for EMI drew praise from Gramophone magazine’s conductor/critic Trevor Harvey – ‘for me easily the most satisfying recorded performance. I wouldn’t want a bar altered anywhere. The Philharmonia give Klemperer the most lovely playing, especially in the quiet string tone...’. In later years Klemperer liked to couple the Mozart G minor with Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony (soon after this 1965 London concert he gave the same programme in Hamburg, his mother’s birthplace). He had first conducted the Bruckner in 1921. It became a work that he used to champion the composer’s music where it was less known and which he liked to perform for his own début engagements in Europe and America. After a concert with the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra in 1927 the critics rejected the music but noted drily that Klemperer was applauded ‘as, it is safe to say, no conductor of a Bruckner symphony has ever been applauded in New York’. Much the same story (appreciative audience, hostile critics) repeated itself in Rome in 1931 and in London.

In February 1958 Klemperer returned to the Symphony in Vienna where the concert began with another of his Mozart favourites, the A major Symphony K.201. The critics, thrilled that Klemperer could now conduct standing up – recovery from a hip operation had kept him seated for a decade before, built up a romantic picture of triumph over physical adversity and, for the Bruckner Seven, bordered on the ecstatic. One writer recalled how Klemperer was actually named in Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus novel as composer Leverkühn’s conductor of choice for the première of his Apokalypse. Others hailed his ‘great deeds’, ‘style of interpretation which made the music into a spiritual power’, his awareness of ‘music’s highest sense, its role as a spiritual discipline’ and his handling of the symphony as ‘song-like, full of streaming lyricism and powerfully shaped climaxes’.

Although neither man lived in the country at the time, there could be little doubt that Otto Klemperer and Yehudi Menuhin were regarded in the mid 1960s as the UK’s leading ‘resident’ Beethoven performers, even though Menuhin had not taken part in the widely applauded Beethoven cycles that Klemperer and the Philharmonia had initiated in 1957. Indeed it seems that the two artists had not worked together since collaborating on the Schumann Violin Concerto in Los Angeles in November 1938.

The collaboration was much anticipated. The Guardian wrote of ‘the unexpected conjunction of magician and monolith’ and warned that ‘a monolith can be severe to the point of dullness and a magician can sometimes seem to be using the wrong spell-book’.

Its review found, however, that ‘the conjunction began to find its form... the slow movement brought the most ethereal music-making of all, and the finale became a relaxed country dance, something that might almost have fitted in the Pastoral Symphony’.

Klemperer’s association with the Symphonie fantastique may have begun (during one of his periodic depressions) in Berlin in 1928 when, newly chosen as the Kroll Opera’s first music director, he was searching for more radical concert repertoire. The Fantastique did not appeal to him at the time (he probably just read the score without rehearsing or performing it) but he changed his mind rapidly after giving the work in concert in Los Angeles in December 1933 – ‘a work of a hyper-genius’ he told his wife.The Guardian’s 1966 concert review summed up Klemperer’s approach to the Fantastique in relation to the contemporary critical attitude to the work – ‘he pays Berlioz the very just compliment of treating him as a real symphonist and not merely as an atmospheric colorist’. But this is not the pure ‘classical’ interpretation of the score that it’s often portrayed as; rather is it a document of the fascination of one conductor (and a composer and an experienced leader of opera to boot) with radical music.

This concert was given as a memorial to the British publisher, liberal humanitarian and music-lover Sir Victor Gollancz (1893-1967). The founder of the influential Left Book Club, Gollancz started his own publishing company in 1927 which came to specialise in left-wing and American books. He was also a prolific writer on political and humanitarian subjects and, eventually, on music. His life was informed by his unconventional religious beliefs – a combination of the Judaism into which he was born, his individual version of Christianity and readings into other faiths. This motivated a life-long activity in human rights issues. It was typical of Gollancz to have been a campaigner both for rescuing Jewish victims of Nazi persecution (and the first to predict a six million death toll) during the Second World War and for giving increased aid to German civilians once the war was over, contesting Field Marshal Montgomery’s plan to allow the population only a little more than concentration-camp rations.

The repertoire for the concert was chosen by Gollancz’s widow Ruth and his daughter Livia and represented all his favourite composers bar Verdi. The programme opened with an appreciation by his friend, The Observer music critic Peter Heyworth, and incorporated quotes from Gollancz’s own writings on the music being performed.

The Schubert, Beethoven and Mozart were old friends of Klemperer’s repertoire; he had first recorded the Unfinished and the Beethoven item with the Berlin Staatskapelle in the 1920s, re-recording them with the Philharmonia in the 1960s. The Love Scene from Roméo et Juliette harked back to Klemperer’s Strasbourg days under Pfitzner when, in 1910, he gave the complete symphony its local première.

The concert programme ended with Gollancz’s praise of music from his 1952 autobiographical sketch My Dear Timothy. ‘Why has no one ever included, among the various “proofs” of the existence of God, the musical? Music is as much mimesis, imitation, as any other of the arts: Beethoven doesn’t invent anything, he perceives something and tries to reproduce it. Then how does it happen, what Beethoven tries to reproduce in, say, the E flat quartet? Can anyone imagine that it happens accidentally?’

Although Otto Klemperer was approaching his 80s and not always in the best of health, the years 1967/68 were a period of great activity for him. The interpreter and creator who had been so at home with the radicalism of late 1920s-early 1930s Berlin picked up on the energy and youth of the age in 1960s London both to make and to work with new friends and colleagues.

With Pierre Boulez he attended and debated contemporary music concerts... . With Daniel Barenboim Klemperer debated Mahler 7, engaged in friendly banter about his own compositions and agreed ... to record with him the Beethoven Piano Concertos and Mozart No.25. He even did some work with Jacqueline du Pré on a test recording of Strauss’s Don Quixote. On his visit to Bayreuth he met Anja Silja and was charmed by her personality and the unsentimental nature of her performance as Elisabeth in Tannhäuser.

While Klemperer’s interest in cutting-edge contemporary music remained lively... his own performing and recording repertoire remained of an earlier vintage... . His Mahler now expanded to take in Symphonies Nos.7 and 9... . The Mozart operas and late symphonies that had once been so important to him... would now be performed, and recorded, in London as well... .

The London newspaper critics in October 1968 talked about this performance of Schumann Two as the rediscovery of a long lost work... . At first Peter Stadlen was perplexed: ‘it still comes as a surprise that Otto Klemperer’s tidily analytical mind will enter a happy symbiosis with Romantic music’. Mosco Carner (The Times) worried about Schumann’s mental health at the time of the score’s composition: because he was having ‘dark days’ (the composer’s own euphemism) surely the symphony couldn’t be good? ‘With Schumann’s difficulty in thinking in strict symphonic terms and his often clunky management of orchestral mechanics, the work would seem to merit its neglect’. Yet, eventually, Carner’s heart won out over his head. ‘Genius must out.

For all its faults each of its four movements contains moments of the sheerest beauty and the Adagio is a pure gem – typical Schumann in its introspection and Versponnenheit (‘airiness’) and demonstrating the puzzling fact of being like most of his slow movements, most imaginatively scored’.