This German disc of music by three generations of Mozarts -- Leopold, Wolfgang Amadeus, and Franz Xaver, billed for a time as Wolfgang Amadeus Jr. -- comes with no printed texts at all. Baritone Konrad Jarnot articulates the words well, but if you don't understand German easily, this disc will be of little use to you. Even if you do, it has its problems. Jarnot has a pleasing, rich tone that works nicely in the works that are closest to the familiar Romantic German art-song vocabulary -- the works of Franz Xaver, and the ...
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This German disc of music by three generations of Mozarts -- Leopold, Wolfgang Amadeus, and Franz Xaver, billed for a time as Wolfgang Amadeus Jr. -- comes with no printed texts at all. Baritone Konrad Jarnot articulates the words well, but if you don't understand German easily, this disc will be of little use to you. Even if you do, it has its problems. Jarnot has a pleasing, rich tone that works nicely in the works that are closest to the familiar Romantic German art-song vocabulary -- the works of Franz Xaver, and the most forward-looking among the little-known songs of Wolfgang Amadeus, such as the Goethe setting Das Veilchen. He doesn't adjust his tone much to take account of the domestic roots of the earlier German lied, however; the opening songs by Leopold Mozart, all very short, and the earlier songs of Wolfgang Amadeus come off as too portentous. The inclusion at the end of a song by Julie von Baroni-Cavalcabò, one of Franz Xaver Mozart's students, offers a nice extension of the parade of...
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