The Genius of Mozart

I rather dipped into this 12-day trawl through all of Mozart on BBC Radio 3, rather than listening to chunks. There were some real high points; I enjoyed the broadcasts of Entführung (especially as I happened to be having a kebab night that evening) and New College’s account of the Requiem with male soloists.

But I still felt the comparable surveys of Beethoven and Bach worked better. As I remarked before, there’s an awful lot of juvenilia to be got through compared with those two, and Mozart’s style doesn’t evolve as much as Beethoven’s, so there’s a lack of variety after a while. Also if you tuned in at the wrong time you got single movements instead of complete works. And despite the Köchel numbers going up to 626, you didn’t have to listen much to start hearing the same pieces more than once; this happened to me with the C minor piano fantasia (one of my Grade 8 piano pieces), the D minor piano concerto and some of the songs. I think this was largely due to allowing listeners and performers to nominate or perform favourite pieces by Mozart, after his entire output had already been programmed at other times.

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