While Kiri Te Kanawa was still preparing for that career-defining debut as the Countess, she made a first Mozart disc under Colin Davis: a collection of sacred music, including the Solemn Vespers, KV 339, with its serene setting of ‘Laudate Dominum’, and Exsultate, jubilate. The Countess became the singer’s calling-card, and she repeated the role […]

The Piano Quartets are like heavenly twins, alike on the outside but very different in tone. The G minor, like all Mozart’s works in that key, is intense, introspective and even tragic in places. The E flat is extrovert, bracing, brilliant and straightforwardly pleasurable. The present performances feature what, at first glance, is a strange […]

Driven almost to distraction by debts, illness in the family – his baby daughter Theresia died on 29 July – and the indifference of a fickle public, Mozart often turned for financial succour to a fellow Freemason, Johann Michael Puchberg. This gentleman, whose name has come down through history solely because of his assistance to […]

On 22 January 1785, Mozart’s father, Leopold, wrote from Salzburg to his daughter, Nannerl, retelling the news ‘that last Saturday (Wolfgang) performed his six quartets [in truth probably just KV 387, 421 and 428] for his dear friend Haydn and other good friends and that he has sold them to Artaria for a hundred ducats’. […]