Mozart, L: Cassation in G 'Toy Symphony'

In 1979, the much-loved British cellist Jacqueline du Pre, then beset with multiple sclerosis (she was diagnosed in 1973), stepped into the recording studio to make what was to be her last recording - not as cellist, but as an engaging narrator in Peter and the Wolf. Her husband Daniel Barenboim conducted a spacious and relaxed account of this timeless story. The coupling was an expanded version of the movements that are frequently heard as Leopold Mozart's Toy Symphony - the Cassation in G. Her spirit ever indomitable, du Pre had actually taken part in performances of this work in 1976 at the Royal Albert Hall, playing a toy drum. (Earlier, as a little girl, she performed it with much enthusiasm on a television show, managing to rupture the instrument!).

This timeless recording has never before been released on CD, and in the spirit of musical-storytelling it is released coupled with two other favourites - Dukas's Sorcerer's Apprentice and Saint-Saens's Danse macabre both recorded some years later by Barenboim.

Leopold Mozart’s reputation has suffered more than that of most of his professional contemporaries, due in no small measure to the fame of his peerless son and to much spiteful and ill-informed criticism over the past 200 years.

Yet he was an acute and sardonic observer of men and morals, a superlative critic and teacher and, as this recording shows, a fine composer whose works circulated well beyond the confines of Salzburg and made the name Mozart famous before it became immortal.

This disc includes the perennially popular ‘Toy Symphony’.