Editorial Reviews

It's hard to believe that Mozart (1756-1791) wrote as much as he did in his brief lifespan -- well over 600 works, many of them large in scale. (As Tom Lehrer once remarked, "It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.") Add to that the fact that he excelled in every musical genre of his time, and his gifts are simply staggering. In two discs, Essential Mozart collects 32 excerpts from a variety of the composer's works, providing a wide-ranging overview of his astonishing output. There are movements from symphonies and sonatas, concertos and chamber music, as well as arias from operas and assorted vocal works. Some of the pieces are little-known charmers (the two orchestral dances on the first disc, for example), but most are major milestones and deserve a place in any classical music collection (the 40th Symphony or the Clarinet Quintet are but two examples). There are some big-name performers here, too: conductors Georg Solti, Neville Marriner, and Herbert von Karajan; instrumentalists Joshua Bell, Andras Schiff, and Vladimir Ashkenazy; and vocalists Cecilia Bartoli, Renée Fleming, and Bryn Terfel, among others. With first-rate performances and excellent sound, Essential Mozart is a perfect introduction to the endless delights of Mozart's music. EJ Johnson, Barnes & Noble

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