★★★★★
It's one of Evgeny Kissin's most stimulating virtues that he doesn't deal in generalities. He seems more interested in individual works than in preconceived notions about their composers. Though he takes care to be well informed, his performances derive ultimately from the music itself.
We think we're familiar with his Chopin - in reality, we are familiar with his Chopins...
- www.classical-music.com
2014-05-20
★★★★★
Fabulous imagination ... pianist Francesco Piemontesi. Photograph: Julien Mignot Francesco Piemontesi's first venture into Mozart on disc is apparently the start of something much more ambitious. The Swiss-Italian pianist, a former pupil of Alfred Brendel, Cécile Ousset and Alexis Weissenberg, is planning to record all of Mozart's piano music and concertos for Naïve over the coming years, and this first sample suggests that it should be a series well worth following closely...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-05-01
★★★★★
A strikingly light, fresh Così with a truly superb ensemble, idiomatic and characterful; the voices are large, but only Mattila sounds a little weighty. Michael Scott Rohan
- www.classical-music.com
2014-04-28
★★★★★
It's not clear why Sony should have chosen to release this particular performance of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, when it must have far greater Met broadcasts to choose from. Leinsdorf, the conductor, is at his most routine, and the singers don't put up much of a fight against him. Kim Borg is grotesquely miscast as the Count, and although Cesare Siepi was a great Figaro, he puts little into this particular effort...
- www.classical-music.com
2014-04-24
★★★★★
Fifty-four years ago, orchestral violinist Neville Marriner and 12 fellow players got together to perform early Italian and German music for fun. They went on to become the world-famous Academy of St Martin in the Fields, an orchestra that breathed new life into the repertoire with its refreshing vitality and clarity of texture. Sir Neville is still fizzing after all these years and busy celebrating his 90th birthday with concerts and recordings, including this Mozart concerto offering...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-04-20
★★★★★
A pungent energy ... the Dunedin Consort Most new recordings of Mozart's famously unfinished Requiem have a new completion of the score as their selling point. Scholars queue up to offer their ideas of what the work might have sounded like had Mozart lived to complete it himself, and demonstrating in the process that what his pupil Frank Xaver Süssmayr did to make the work performable - he produced the version of the score that was always heard until the last quarter of the 20th...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-04-03
★★★★★
The Obligation of the First Commandment was composed by Mozart when he was just 11. Though it contains stage directions, Ian Page's notes suggest that any 1767 Salzburg staging would have been rudimentary; think of it, perhaps, as an oratorio as much as sacred opera.
It is certainly sacred. Ignaz Anton von Weiser's libretto shows a half-hearted Christian tempted by Worldliness, though finally brought back into the fold by the cajoling of Divine Mercy and the threats of Divine Justice...
- www.classical-music.com
2014-03-04
★★★★★
Director Robert Carsen counted more than 60 references to death in Die Zauberflöte; so it's perhaps no surprise to find Tamino clambering out of a grave at the start of this production for last spring's Baden-Baden Easter Festival. The Three Ladies are in mourning, Monostatos and his crew are gravediggers, and Sarastro and company, who seem to inhabit Pluto's realm of darkness, are blindfolded.
Think Eros and Thanatos; think the battle between life, love and death...
- www.classical-music.com
2014-03-03
★★★★★
The death of Claudio Abbado has deprived us of the one of the greatest conductors of our time, and more: the young Orchestra Mozart he founded has ceased operation, and he was one of the few concerto partners with whom the elusive pianist Martha Argerich was happy to work. So this rush-released live disc has a precious status, and although not perfect is overwhelmingly beautiful. Argerich digs deeply into the keys, but never makes an ugly sound...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-02-09
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