If the Bicentenary is going to serve any useful purpose other than shifting recycled recordings, souvenir booklets and Mozart holidays, then it must be to bring people a greater appreciation and love of a composer who is already impossible to dislike, but who is also all too easy to misunderstand. The increased availability of Mozart's music is certainly a good start, especially if more people simply get to know a greater part of his output, but to those who already have plenty of the stuff on their shelves the record companies' flooding of the market with glossy Mozart packages must seem of questionable value. True, it means there's a lot of this composer on sale at bargain-price, but with so many Bicentenary box-sets consisting of reissues or fairly ordinary new recordings, revelations seem likely to be few, and in truth many offerings look like little more than an unthinking short cut to swelling one's collection.
Listening to the music is, of course, the best way to get to know any composer, but being given the chance to set that music in context and learn from it—especially in view of the hysteria which currently surrounds Mozart—certainly doesn't go amiss. For this reason The Mozart Almanac, Decca's contribution to 'The Big B', is to be welcomed; amid the deluge of unchallengingly commercial Mozart it is a rare attempt to offer something for the listener who would like to emerge from 1991 with more for his or her money and interest than just a larger CD collection. Compiled by no less a figure than H. C. Robbins Landon, it aims within the relatively modest span of 20 CDs to present a chronological survey of the composer's work by allotting one disc to every year from 1775 to 1790, one each to the periods 1761-70 and 1771-74, and two to 1791. Each disc offers a selection of the most important works from the year or period in question, together with an insert-note by Prof Landon that is more or less relevant to that disc.
I say more or less because although Decca describe the Almanac as ''a diary of Mozart's life'', the accompanying information is not so much a chronological documentation of historical events as a series of essays which range from accounts of Mozart's activities for a given year, to surveys of different areas of his output, to discussions of particular facets of his musical personality. The pure logistics of this means that some notes can become irritatingly dislocated from their subject matter, so that while, for instance, the CD for 1778—containing works such as the A minor Piano Sonata, the E minor Violin Sonata and the Paris Symphony—has an entirely appropriate article on Mozart's journey to Paris, the 1783 disc, devoted principally to the C minor Mass, has as the main substance of its insert note an introduction to the composer's chamber music (presumably because no other place could be found for it). Such a complaint may seem churlish, but it's certainly frustrating that one can't take a CD at random from this set and count on finding the information one wants in its accompanying booklet. The fact, too, that none of the opera extracts is furnished with a text or even an explanation of what it is about is typical of the way in which the imaginative thinking behind this project has not really been carried through with the thoroughness it deserves. This is a shame when one considers that it's primarily the method of presentation that distinguished this set from its rivals, and also that Landon's articles are a characteristic mixture of profound knowledge and buoyant enthusiasm. And things could have been considerably improved in one bound, just by putting all the notes together in one nice, big book.
As for the music, one important thing to emphasize is that this is not a collection slavishly devoted to offering 'Mozart You Have Loved'. To be sure, you do get many of the pops: Eine kleine Nachtmusik and the G minor Symphony are here for instance, but there is no Jupiter, and the opera extracts tend to be whole scenes rather than favourite arias. All the pieces seem to have been chosen with the genuine intention of providing a balanced view of Mozart's work, and although there are some glaring omissions—operatic music before Idomeneo is represented only by a few insertion arias (all conveniently taken from the same original release), and chamber music is in lamentably short supply with no string quartet appearing until the 1790 CD (that means no ''Haydn'' Quartets) and not a single work for piano trio or quartet to be heard at all—the end result is by and large a judicious mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar.
The other thing is that, of course, the whole thing draws almost entirely on Decca's back catalogue. Some are more than 30 years old, and the only ones you couldn't have heard before are a rather woolly account of the Credo Mass by the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, under Nicholas Cleobury, and Pascal Roge's performance of some unexciting early piano pieces, the latter recorded in Paris two years ago and, one assumes, specially so the set can offer K1. (Incidentally K3 and K9a, described three times on the CD as minuets, are both in fact allegros in duple time!) The rest appear to have been chosen for the music rather than the performances, which presumably explains the presence of such unexceptional recordings as Arthur Balsam's smudgy D major Piano Sonata, K284, or an account by Wolfgang Schulz and Heinz Medjimorec of the 'Flute Sonata' (in reality an accompanied keyboard sonata), K14. But there are stars here too: Pavarotti turns up with Lucia Popp, Agnes Baltsa and Edita Gruberova in Pritchard's Idomeneo; Solti conducts singers such as Frederica von Stade, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Stuart Burrows with hard-driven vigour (matched by the virtuoso playing of the Vienna Philharmonic) in extracts from Die Entfurung aus dem Serail, Le nozze de Figaro, Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflote; and the Oistrakhs can be heard giving a meaty account of the Duo for violin and viola, K423.
Certain names predominate, however. One of them is Christopher Hogwood, whose pioneering Mozart symphony cycle with the Academy of Ancient Music is plundered for nine out of the ten symphonies that appear in the set (and which might be said to constitute its backbone). Period-instrument performance has made considerable strides, even in the ten years or so since Hogwood's series was completed, but despite occasional roughness (for example, the wind-playing in Symphony No. 32) and the oft-remarked rhythmic inflexibility of Hogwood's slow movements, it's good to hear these performances still sounding in many ways as fresh and exciting as they did when they first appeared. Hogwood's numerous other contributions include the two great unfinished sacred masterpieces, and while his Requiem makes a rather disappointing end to the set, the C minor Mass gets an excellent performance, marvellously exciting in its choral and orchestral sound and with some powerful intense solo singing from Arleen Auger.
Another star is Andras Schiff, who with characteristic poise and precision performs three piano sonatas, Eine kleine Gigue, K514, and, with Sandor Vegh and the Salzburg Mozarteum Camerata Academia, four piano concertos. This is classy pianism indeed, and the delicacy of touch Schiff brings to, say, the first movement of K453 or the Andante of K456 can only be admired, even if K595 perhaps errs towards the precious. Such reverential playing makes an interesting comparison, too, with the more robust, no-nonsense approach of Vladimir Ashkenazy, who is the soloist and director of the Philharmonia in three bigger concertos, K466, K467 and K491.
Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields also feature prominently—here accompanying the Schola Cantorum of Oxford in a sharply-defined performance of the Coronation Mass, then stepping into the limelight for a sweet-toned account of Eine kleine Nachtmusik—and so do Willi Boskovsky and his Vienna Mozart Ensemble, who bring life-giving Viennese style to several sets of orchestral marches, minuets and German dances.
But there are plenty of less prolific contributors, as a glance at the heading of this review will quickly show. With such a mixed bag, no two listeners will have the same favourites or betes noires, but among the rest I enjoyed the soft, gently blended period tones of the Amadeus Winds in the C minor Serenade, K388, and Istvan Kertesz's grandly powerful rendering of the Masonic Funeral Music with the LSO, a performance of such impressive weight that you half expect this five-minute piece to be the beginning of some great tone-poem. Less pleasing, I thought, were the extracts from Arnold Ostman's weedy Cosi fan tutte, and a pretty dreadful Ave verum corpus recorded in 1958 by George Guest and the Choir of St John's College, Cambridge.
The strength of this set, however, lies ultimately in more than just the performances it contains. Unlike the other Mozart sets on offer, this one is designed to be listened to in order, and doing so will take you on an illuminating journey through the composer's life and personality. The transition from the brilliant young musician to whom composing came with staggering ease during the 1770s, to the artist of rapidly growing maturity and creative independence of the early Vienna years, and thence to the increasingly inward-looking master of the later years, unable to comprehend his dwindling success, is all vividly mapped out by the music. Ultimately it's a tragic tale that only the composer himself can adequately relate. Listen to this set from Disc 1 to Disc 20 and you'll not only hear it for yourself, you might just feel that you know this most complex of composers a little better.'