Mozart: Die Zauberflöte, K620: Overture

Andrea Marcon and his terrific ensemble, La Cetra, approach Mozart à la Baroque − vigorously, colourfully, and with acute awareness of the sound world the composer was born into but changed forever. These overtures are gems of melodic inspiration, ingenious orchestration, and sheer zest that stand on their own.

This is Babette Dorn’s third CD featuring piano arrangements of Mozart’s highly popular operatic themes. World Premiere Recording

Andreas Grau and Götz Schumacher met in1981 at the ages of 15 and 16 and have worked together ever since. These transcriptions, mostly for two pianos, include Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Saint-Saëns Introduction and Rondo capriccioso Op.28 and Rachmaninov’s Vocalise.

This is the debut CD of these young and top-notch wind players. Their recital includes an arrangement of Mozart’s Magic Flute Overture, Danzi’s highly polished and sophisticated Wind Quintet in G minor, as well as a quintet from the 1920s by Haas. The collection is like a scintillating, colourful and virtuoso cocktail.

Mozart is not the first composer one associates with Sir John Barbirolli, yet his name was never long absent from the conductor’s programmes. The G minor Symphony No.40 was in the very first programme Barbirolli conducted with the Hallé Orchestra – in the old Free Trade Hall, Manchester in January 1933 – and he chose the ‘Linz’ Symphony (No.36) for his first concert as conductor of the New York Philharmonic in November 1936. So the canard that in some way JB tried to avoid Mozart because the critics did not always approve of his interpretations is unjust: that in New York he chose a Mozart symphony for arguably the most crucial concert of his career is sufficient refutation in itself.

Barbirolli had conducted Mozart symphonies with his own chamber orchestra in the 1920s, when he first took up conducting, and it was then that he grew particularly fond of the Symphony No.29 in A. (In later years he invariably reduced the orchestra to near-chamber proportions for both Mozart and Haydn.) These Pye stereo recordings of the Symphony No.41 ‘Jupiter’ and Symphony No.29 were recorded in 1956 and the Overture to ‘Die Zauberflote’ in 1959 and have been digitally remastered by EMI.

The nine large-scale Concert Arias for Baritone and Orchestra by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart date for the most part from the composer’s last creative period.

Mozart’s operas are part of our cultural heritage. Everyone knows, more or less consciously, the most famous arias, which are even available as ringtones for mobile phones! Mozart can make us laugh, dream, ponder or weep, with the brilliance and variety of Homer or Shakespeare, and with emotions constantly on a knife-edge. From The Magic Flute to Don Giovanni, from arias to overtures, here is an ideal anthology of Mozart opera.

Romanian-born Constantin Silvestri was principal conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra from 1961 until his death from cancer in 1969 aged 55, two years after being granted British citizenship. It was certainly not material gain that tempted Silvestri to the seaside town of Bournemouth nor the kudos of association with an internationally famous orchestra. Inevitably the question was asked (and still is) why did someone who had already been the guest conductor of some of the world’s most renowned orchestras - the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics, the Concertgebouw, five of Britain’s most prestigious and two in the US - each time attracting audience enthusiasm and mainly favourable reviews, why did he choose to become principal conductor of a provincial orchestra, however worthy its reputation, and in a country with whose language he was barely acquainted? What can be gleaned of Silvestri’s motives from his answer when this question was put to him in a television interview? ‘I was a teacher in Romania for ten years and a conductor is also a teacher... The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra has a national reputation, but I think in two or three years it will become internationally famous.’