It may be argued that, what with the pages of listings that come up when one searches a website for recordings of Mozart's Requiem, the world was not in dire need of one more. But this recording from Germany's classical-music heartland city of Leipzig makes a strong contribution to the ongoing discourse surrounding this unique work, which Mozart left uncompleted during his final illness. It was finished by his student Franz Xaver Süssmayr so that Mozart's wife, Constanze, could collect on the anonymous commission that had ...
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It may be argued that, what with the pages of listings that come up when one searches a website for recordings of Mozart's Requiem, the world was not in dire need of one more. But this recording from Germany's classical-music heartland city of Leipzig makes a strong contribution to the ongoing discourse surrounding this unique work, which Mozart left uncompleted during his final illness. It was finished by his student Franz Xaver Süssmayr so that Mozart's wife, Constanze, could collect on the anonymous commission that had stimulated the composition of the work in the first place. Constanze, an acute observer of the rise of the Romantic spirit, later claimed that Mozart had written the Requiem because of a premonition of his own death, and many performances heavily dramatize the work's passages of tumultuous minor-key counterpoint. The Leipziger Kammerorchester (Leipzig Chamber Orchestra) and Gewandhaus Kammerchor (Gewandhaus Chamber Choir) under Morten Schuldt-Jensen aim to strip away some of the...
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