Mozart’s Symphonies Nos. 13-16 date from a period when the composer was devoting a great deal of his time to symphonic writing, and are particularly interesting from the light they shed on his gradual moulding of the essentially lightweight opera sinfonia to the weightier symphonic manner of Haydn and his Viennese contemporaries. They were penned when he was just fifteen! The last two symphonies on this recording date from after Mozarts’ return home in March 1773 from the third Italian sojourn, during which Wolfgang’s opera Lucio Silla was premiered in Milan. They mark a return to the Italianate overture-symphony, without minuets and largely lacking the repeated sections characteristic of the Germanic concert-symphony.
This 2CD set represents all the Mozart symphonies – eleven in all – that Neville Marriner and the Academy recorded for Argo from 1968–71. He was later to re-record some of these works for Philips, in much-praised performances, but the freshness and vitality of these earlier recordings, shared between London’s Kingsway Hall and St. John’s, Smith Square, have an allure of their own.
