Die Entführung aus dem Serail. Par MOZART WOLFGANG AMADEUS. “Wonderful! But, aren’t there too many notes?” asked the emperor Joseph II. “No, all notes are necessary. This is new music, ” replied Mozart. This is a famous anecdote about the premiere of the opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio), which took place on July 16, 1782 at the Burgtheater Wien (Vienna). It ill…

Fragments K. 442. Par MOZART WOLFGANG AMADEUS. Mozart often began work on a composition only to put it aside, unfinished. Some of these fragments contain wonderful music, as is proved by these three Piano trio fragments. Mozart composed them at different times as individual movements, though the posthumous first edition brought them together as a supposedly new and unknown Piano trio by the compos…

Dramma giocoso (Opera) in two acts. Par MOZART WOLFGANG AMADEUS. In early 1787 Mozart made his first visit to Prague, where he attended a performance of Le nozze di Figaro on 17 January and conducted the performance five days later. Thoroughly impressed by the huge success of his opera and the personal triumphs he had enjoyed during his visit, he and his wife left the city on 7 February, but not b…

for Piano and Orchestra. Par MOZART WOLFGANG AMADEUS. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's concertos for Piano and Orchestra reveal the then young form in classical perfection. Among the most beautiful of them, which are quite equals of his great symphonies, are the works which he composed in a two year period (1784- 1786) which marks the highest peak in Mozart's instrumental writing and in his career as a v…

Arrangeur: Cho-Liang Lin. Over the wonderfully enjoyably years of conducting, there have been so many fine encounters with the Mozart Violin Concertos - mostly with very gifted players like Menuhin, Oistrakh, Stern and, more recently, Cho-Liang (Jimmy) Lin. There have, however, been instances (only a few, I'm pleased to say) when I've come, in the performances, to dread the onslaught of those cade…

Par MOZART WOLFGANG AMADEUS. Requiem K. 626 The Requiem, completed by Franz Xaver Sussmayr, in its traditional form. Mozart's final work, the Requiem K. 626, was left incomplete and it is fraught with questions and emotions: the expressive depth of its music, sorrow at the great composer's early death, truth and legend, fragments and attempts to complete the work. The completion of the fragmentary…

Excerpts from Movement 4. Par MOZART WOLFGANG AMADEUS. Developing an intimate understanding of the world’s greatest musical accomplishments is an important part of a music education. Every musician should have the joy of playing the music of Mozart, and the G-minor Symphony (Number 40) is one of Mozart’s signature works, and one of the greatest musical achievements of all time. Stephen Bulla has c…

a 6 et a 8. Par MOZART WOLFGANG AMADEUS. The Serenade in E-flat, K. 375, exists in two versions, one for two clarinets, two horns and two bassoons, and another for the same forces plus two oboes, forming an octet. From Mozart himself we know a fair amount about the occasion that led to the first, six-instrument version of this work and about its early performances. Written for the sister-in-law of…

According to Mozart's own catalogue, K. 491 was completed on 24 March 1786 - it was Mozart's only piano concerto aside from K. 466 that was in a minor key. It was probably first performed two weeks later as part of an 'academy? at the Burgtheater in Vienna. Mozart was extremely pressed for time while composing this work, a fact that is shown both by the cursory way in which the autograph was writt…