The supreme work of the most extraordinary man: this is what the composer Johann Adam Hiller called Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's "Requiem", which is now being released by Genuin in an unusual arrangement. The piano duo Kerstin Straßburg and Jürgen Appell have recorded for the first time the astonishing four-hand piano version of the Mozart Requiem by Carl Czerny, a pupil of Beethoven and teacher of Liszt. The choral parts, vocal solos, and all the orchestral parts have been incorporated into the piano part, allowing the polyphonic beauty of Mozart's work to emerge in a kind of concentration with unimaginable clarity. The world premiere recording of this version on CD also contains the moving Amen fugue to the "Lacrymosa", which the New York pianist Robert D. Levin reconstructed from fourteen bars of Mozart's handwriting discovered several years ago.
