Mozart Edition - complete this time.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I had a copy of her book Unfinished Symphonies given to me - her "work" (or, if one is that way inclined, "her" work) had quite a few respected names quoted in support of it. I can only hope that they made these comments with the wish that this would make the publishers stop nagging them for a quotation for the blurb! I'm far from a admirer of Liszt's work, but I appreciate it sufficiently to be able to spot a mile off that it's significantly better than what was claimed to have been produced in a better place!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Well - nine weeks to the day after starting to play through the discs, yesterday I came to the end. Three or four discs per day every day - and today it felt a little odd not to be hearing any Mozart!

The set is an extraordinary achievement - there's nothing in the box that is a complete duff performance. The Hager recordings of the earlier Operas and Choral works are rather plodding and shouty in the choruses, and lack imagination and sleight-of-hand in the recitatives - I would certainly seek out better alternatives; but the arias and duets are better handled and get closer to spirit and achievement of these teenaged works. I doubt that I will ever play again the CDs of German Dances, Contredanses, Minuets all the way through (and I think that Marriner's and Boskovsky's laboured tempi in the Minuets does far more damage to the Music than Hager does in the early operas) - but I shall be making frequent selections from the discs to fill in the odd quarter-hour listening. (Much more my thing, these days, than Strauss family repertoire - I'd love to hear the Freiberg Baroquers record this Music.) In fact, the only disc in the box that I can only imagine playing again just to see if the performance was as bad as I'd remembered is the Bastien und Bastienne - the kids from the Vienna Boys' Choir here is not my sort of thing at all!

The pluses and discoveries were a real joy: many works I'd never heard before, or only once or twice before. The Serenades and Divertimenti really took me back with their originality and ways of structuring Music very different from the more familiar (to me) Sonata procedures of the Symphonies, Concertos, and Chamber Music - but even in these more familiar genres, I heard things I don't remember encountering before: the Piano Quartets (fantastic pieces!) and Piano Trios - hours and hours ahead of me familiarising myself with these works. I hadn't expected that I'd want to play the "Fragments/Sketches" discs more than once, but I'm hooked on them! Fascinating shifting ideas, creating quite surreal effects heard in sequence as on these discs not least the Pythonesque "Magnificat": a brief orchestral tutti fanfare followed by a choral "Magnificat!" - and that's it! Little "scribbled on an envelope" ideas for a Piano Trio - just the first phrase, or a more worked-out Exposition, with little bits for solo violin, then Piano right hand. And it is so incredible to follow the infant composer coming to grips with his craft in the earliest Kochel numbers - I've had (many!) GCSE students who haven't grasped the notion of phrasing and melodic continuity as well as the six-year-old composer.

My only slight "quibble" is in the choice of "Historical" supplementary performances (not those which allow alternative Period/Modern performance comparisons, but those put in to allow earlier post-War recordings). Some of these are superb - Erich Kleiber's Figaro holds its place with the very best available - others less so, I felt. And they do leave questions about who has been left out; Furtwangler doesn't feature at all (EMI have the rights to his g minor Symphony and Gran Partita - but DG have a 39th Symphony that I would have preferred to the recordings from Bohm) and Karajan only as accompanist to Friederica von Stade in an Aria from "Figaro". I did get the feeling that the selection here was made to bring the number of CDs up to 200; there are a couple of discs of Opera arias cobbled together from complete sets that are just there to be there - it might have seemed less arbitrary if they'd added a few more and put 225 discs in the 225 year anniversary box!

But that doesn't represent this terrific achievement fairly; not least because of the extraordinary generosity of playing times on the discs - about a quarter of them have running times of well over 80 minutes. To think that without the BaL (and the Amazon price reduction) I wouldn't've ever thought of getting this set - it has become a prize in my collection, one that I plan to make the central focus of my listening over the next few years.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

My only slight "quibble" is in the choice of "Historical" supplementary performances (not those which allow alternative Period/Modern performance comparisons, but those put in to allow earlier post-War recordings). Some of these are superb - Erich Kleiber's Figaro holds its place with the very best available - others less so, I felt. And they do leave questions about who has been left out; Furtwangler doesn't feature at all (EMI have the rights to his g minor Symphony and Gran Partita - but DG have a 39th Symphony that I would have preferred to the recordings from Bohm) and Karajan only as accompanist to Friederica von Stade in an Aria from "Figaro".

Surely the copyright on Furtwangler's recordings has expired.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Surely the copyright on Furtwangler's recordings has expired.

I would have thought so - and those on Karajan's early Cosi and Flute, and Beecham's and Brain's recordings - but nothing there that doesn't originate in the DG/Philips/Decca catalogues. Perhaps they only wanted to include remasterings where they owned the master tapes? (The remasterings are at a high level, too - very clear, but requiring the volume to be reduced a notch or two.)

[Dave2002]

Surely the copyright on Furtwangler's recordings has expired.

Not if Disney and MCA have anything to do with it. OK, we're in the EU (just) and the rules may be different, but we kow tow to the big business in the US too much, so perhaps the copyright hasn't expired yet.

Wonder if we can send tweets to DT next week about this!