Word: mozarts
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...initial signs seem promising. Period-instrument ensembles, whose preoccupations often serve as an index of the most exciting and ground-breaking activity in classical music interpretation, are forging ahead in their revision of the Mozart canon. As the Mozart bicentenary wheezed to a close, John Eliot Gardiner embarked on a project to record all of the operas; his first release, Idomeneo, has solidified Mozart's claims to mastery of opera seria as well as opera buffa...
...January, Christopher Hogwood offered a concert performance, with the Handel and Haydn Society, of Mozart's second and last effort in the serious vein, La Clemenza di Tito. The renewal of these two pieces, which circumscribe Mozart's years of maturity and his best musical output, has been the major revelation in the months after the festivities anticlimaxed with innumerable performances of the Requiem last November...
...image it set out to falsify: the delicate porcelain infant seated at a porcelain keyboard. But as the child prodigy gives way to the giggling imp, the relationship between the reprehensible or at least unremarkable man and his great music becomes paradoxical. And, ironically, the popular conception of Mozart has been shaped by a film in which the composer is a supporting actor...
...Mozart of the public consciousness is now an absent author, a passive mouthpiece for, according to Salieri in the film, "the voice of God." But in a world without God, whose voice is it that we hear in Mozart's music...
...question that we instinctively shrink from. And our incapacity to account for the power that undeniable resides in this music leaves room for cynicism and the logic of the market. Mozart the man is today an inscrutable phenomenon and, as such, we have no reason to assume a priori that his music is good, that his long-dismissed serious operas deserve another look...