If you aren't impressed by Mozart...

[Bryn]

The Lili Krauss set can be found at amazon.co.uk, but at a higher price than that on the Presto site. A search for "Lili Kraus Plays Mozart" at amazon.co.uk also brings up a useful Vox double CD album which I have just ordered via their marketplace.

[amateur51]

http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/ is your friend!
They have the 5CD set of the 1954 Haydn Society recordings, digitally restored. They also have a DVD.

Thanks for the links.

Many thanks Pianoanorak for the Presto link and thanks to Bryn for the Mozart Piano concerto suggestion too.

Riches indeed!

[Peter Katin]

I don't think this belongs to the current thread but I would like to know if the BBC are justifying close-carpeting Mozart by playing so many excerpts. All these single movements I find too much like "tasters". However, if that is so, this morning I concluded that I'd have like to hear rather more of the K310 from Schnabel and none at all from Uchida's tinsel-box rendering of the K280's first movement.

[salymap]

Yes I stupidly thought everything meant everything, That is complete works.Not so. I agree with Peter Katin, how do they justify this?

[Bryn]

Ah, thank you Peter. It's so good to find a musician of your distinction who shares my disdain for M.U.'s Mozart playing. I was even begining to think I was missing something, but now feel more assured than ever that it is her who misses rather a lot, and not just in Mozart.

[Ferretfancy]

This may seem a bit OTT, but I think that basically there's Mozart up there, and the rest lower down the ladder. His music is an inexhaustible part of my life.
However, and it's a big however, I don't think his reputation is given much service by devoting Radio 3 to him excluding all others for 12 days non stop. Just as an example, I enjoy hearing Mozart's juvenilia from time to time, but should we be given them all? I don't think so. Surely any great composer's music is not simply a product to be provided on tap.
How do other Mozart lovers feel about this?
Perhaps I'm over reacting, but even in live concerts a varied programme usually provides a context which often sharpens our enjoyment.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

No, I don't think you are overreacting, Ferret. Out of general interest, and for reference, I think it's important that the minor works of great composers are available for us to hear, and I like to collect complete editions. But for general listening/performing, concert/opera promoters and broadcasters need to be selective. The idea that every note Mozart wrote is "perfect" is quite ludicrous. Much of it is less good than that of some of his contemporaries, but a good third of his works are so amazing that Mozart deserves his status as one of the greatest musical minds of all time.

[aeolium]

I love much of Mozart's music also, but I am utterly opposed to this form of saturation coverage - as I was with the Bach and Beethoven fests years back. It is even worse with Mozart as he wrote so much, and quite a lot of the earlier works - I suggest with a few exceptions most works up to around K200 - are really not better than comparable works by his contemporaries (in some cases only noticeable because Mozart was so young when he wrote them). But it's not merely the early works: there are significant variations in quality between works in genres that interested him or where the commissions were important to him and mere potboiler compositions such as the sets of dances he had to compose in the last year of his life - and for which he was paid, as he said, 'too much for what I did, too little for what I could have done'.

It is wrong to programme music in this way because with the greatest works you need time to take in what you have heard. How can you listen to three operas in succession - Cosi, Figaro and La Clemenza di Tito - which is being scheduled for one of the days? It would be like listening to, or watching three different Shakespeare plays. As Ff suggests, you must have variety and not treat Mozart like musical wallpaper. And if there is anything worse than having his music played for 12 days non-stop, it is having it played in 'bleeding chunks', which someone has mentioned on another thread has been happening with a number of the programmes so far.

Mozart does not need this attention. He is already - as Suffolkcoastal has indicated elsewhere - one of the most frequently broadcast composers on R3 and also on Classic FM. He is also one of the most frequently programmed composers in concerts. If R3 wanted to broadcast rarely heard compositions by him, they could easily accommodate that within their existing schedules - in place of some works that are heard all too often.

I can think of no other R3 Controller who would have thought this a worthwhile exercise - most would have considered the idea quite ludicrous and unworthy of a serious public service broadcaster. It smacks of the charity fundraising event, the Guinness Book of Records gimmick, the headline-grabber. It represents one of the lows in R3's history, but - as Edgar said, "The worst is not/As long as we can say 'This is the worst'".

[kernelbogey]

It is wrong to programme music in this way because with the greatest works you need time to take in what you have heard. How can you listen to three operas in succession - Cosi, Figaro and La Clemenza di Tito - which is being scheduled for one of the days? [....] Mozart does not need this attention. He is already - as Suffolkcoastal has indicated elsewhere - one of the most frequently broadcast composers on R3 and also on Classic FM. He is also one of the most frequently programmed composers in concerts. If R3 wanted to broadcast rarely heard compositions by him, they could easily accommodate that within their existing schedules - in place of some works that are heard all too often [.....] I can think of no other R3 Controller who would have thought this a worthwhile exercise - most would have considered the idea quite ludicrous and unworthy of a serious public service broadcaster.....

I disagree with much of this opinion. I think it wise (and helpful to our mental health ) to recognise that radio is used in many different ways by many different people. No one is obliged, or even likely, to listen to three operas on one day just because they're programmed: but some might sample all three. While I also dislike the playing of single movements - the Schnabel extract on Sunday morning was a particularly bonkers example - I know that some people will dip in and out of Radio 3 experimentally. I, too, find there is too much to listen to, and had grave reservations in advance of the broadcasts: yet I have gained a lot over the last 2 days from the project. I was, for example, moved by Jane Glover talking this morning about the Requiem and Mozart's death. I've heard early works for the first time. I don't agree that we should hear only what's 'good' - absolutely, and not just in this context - for without exposure to the ordinary and the journeyman work in any art form how can we learn to recognise excellence? And to say that 'no other R3 Controller [..] would have thought this a worthwhile exercise' is a bit like saying that no Victorian railway engineer would have thought flying either a safe or a commercial prospect. I think those who love serious music and care about Radio3 might usefully think about the role of outreach. And, for goodness sake, twelve days out of 365 is around 3% of the total.

[salymap]

I agree with Ferretfancy that it is too much of a good thing. As it is there I am listening to quite a lot but had it been up to me, [fat chance], I would have added a few mixed concerts or spread it out in some way.
I'm enjoying the talks with people like Jane Glover, the programme about Mozart in London at 8 year old, rarities like that. I strong object to Eine Kleine or other popular works being ruined by using them as
introductory music or snippets in other ways. And one movement of Mozart PC 17 only. Why not the whole
work?

[Peter Katin]

Yes I stupidly thought everything meant everything, That is complete works.

I don't know how they can do this, having said that "every single note" would be broadcast. Only yesterday I heard the beautiful second movement of the K467 concerto - twice. So what happens to the outer movements?

[aeolium]

I don't agree that we should hear only what's 'good' - absolutely, and not just in this context - for without exposure to the ordinary and the journeyman work in any art form how can we learn to recognise excellence? And to say that 'no other R3 Controller [..] would have thought this a worthwhile exercise' is a bit like saying that no Victorian railway engineer would have thought flying either a safe or a commercial prospect. I think those who love serious music and care about Radio3 might usefully think about the role of outreach. And, for goodness sake, twelve days out of 365 is around 3% of the total.

I agree with your point about being exposed to the ordinary and the journeyman as well as the excellent, but why do we need to hear all of Mozart's works to do that - we could just as well listen to works by his contemporaries such as J C Bach, Cimarosa, Salieri? And I suggested it was quite possible for R3 to programme rarely heard works by Mozart within its normal schedules.

Your analogy about the Victorian railway engineer I don't think holds. At least two previous Controllers could technically have mounted something like the 12-day Mozartathon. That they would not have considered it would have been down to artistic or aesthetic concerns - that this was really not a good way to listen to the works of a great composer. Of course one can dip in and out of the broadcasts (only an insane insomniac could do otherwise) but in that case what is the point of broadcasting the complete works? And everything is covered by the blanket epithet "the genius of Mozart", as if that equally applies to the first symphonies and the Cassation in G on the one hand and Don Giovanni, the G minor string quintet and the C minor piano concerto on the other.

Sorry, for me it is really poor programming. I recall a discussion on Music Matters a couple of months back in which the point was raised that the first example of the commodification of Mozart was the commemorations for the 150th anniversary of his death by the Nazis. This was succeeded in 1991 by the mass of CD reissues and the Complete Philips Edition. The current exercise simply extends it to Mozart as broadcastable commodity - in bulk.

[Peter Katin]

And, for goodness sake, twelve days out of 365 is around 3% of the total.

Yes, but may I emphazise that we get far more than 3%; there are, throughout the year, very few programmes that don't include a Mozart work. Given this, I'm not sure what a 12-day diet is really intended to achieve.

[french frank]

Well, I think there are two reasons for the 12-day Mozartathon, and its predecessors, both of them bad:

1) As RW has said, 'they are all different ways in which to draw attention to what Radio 3 does on a daily basis'. Well, begging his pardon, but regular listeners already know what R3 does on a daily basis, so these 12 days are mainly for people who don't know but who might, perhaps, be interested (although the vast majority of the population clearly won't be).

2) Clearing the schedules completely for a number of days means that regular slots are only disturbed for one, at most two, weeks, and then can resume. And the classical programmes only have to have their playlists modified somewhat and they can continue unaffected: it's virtually business as usual. I'm not denying it's a lot of hard work pulling all the bits together, but it means for the rest of the year the schedule can relapse into its stripped lethargy again.

Should we wait until it's finished to hold our own poll? After all, we won't all be of the same view on this, and there's no reason why we should be just because we all post on the same forum.

[salymap]

If Morecambe and Wise were still with us they could do a reprise of the wonderful Previn sketch. All the right notes, not necessarily in all of the movements of all of the works. Bah, it's unbelievable.