Customer Reviews

Mozart: Eine kleine Nachtmusik; Ein musikalischer Spass; Divertimento K136

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Mozart, ah Mozart. This recording is fabulous and The Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Chamber Ensemble have done a wonderful job of bringing Mozart's music to life. This CD is great to listen to during that last hour before going to bed. Music to wind down with and end the day. I highly recommend it!

While there is plenty of humour to be found in classical music - not least in Haydn - in my opinion there are only two instances where a genuine belly-laugh is on offer.

In Paradise, Florence Foster Jenkins will be the great soprano that she was always meant to be. Until then, we can only surrender abjectly to the merriment The Glory (????) of the Human Voice. Truly, she let her light shine. Not a few exorcists have been known to call upon her services 'when push comes to shove.'

The other great laugh is Mozart's K 522: Ein musikalischer Spaß. What a warped masterpiece it is: replete with "disturbances of symmetery, false progressions, pointless virtuoso scale passages, wayward shifts in the harmony and banal melodies." It takes mastery of the highest order to perpetrate these transgressions. Better still, they are committed with gusto. My favourite is the slow movement - an adagio cantabile, no less; in its cadenza, Mozart demands a Paganini-like speed before gratuitously dropping back to the original tempo. Teaching is a noble profession and any of its practitioners can surely relate to the calamitous fugue that closes the work: it was penned by one of Mozart's less gifted students. Here, his shortcomings are immortalised.

The great merit of this performance is that these stylish musicians from the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields play it straight.

The cosmos demands symmetery. As Einstein astutely noted, Mozart squared the ledger by writing Eine Kleine Nachtmusik in quick succession. This disc yokes the two works together. While K 525 can be performed deftly by 'legions in battle array', Mozart: Divertimento K.287; Eine Kleine Nachtmusik K. 525 [Germany] here is it presented in its original format - and how it sparkles.

The third work on offer - and the least important - is the first of the so-called Salzburg Symphonies. It is a minor masterpiece. Its Italianate sunshine is well caught in this rendition.

All in all, this is a wonderful disc. Sure, you can pick up these performances in one of those Complete Mozart Edition boxes, but there is an anachronistic beauty to collecting these discs one by one; if a copy comes your way, do not hesitate.

Don't read my review.
Go out and buy this CD.
It's one of my favorite!
You'll be thanking me after you've listened to it.
Well, what are you waiting for?