These recordings are proclaimed by Austrian historical reissue house Preiser Records to have been part of the "legendary" Mozart Jubilee Edition, issued by Philips in 1956 to mark the 200th anniversary of Mozart's birth. They apparently come from a pair of the original LPs, one devoted to Mozart's Masonic choral music and one to what were designated as concert arias for bass; many of them are insertion arias or other pieces of operatic miscellany. To judge from the considerable surface noise, the CD was produced from LP ...
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These recordings are proclaimed by Austrian historical reissue house Preiser Records to have been part of the "legendary" Mozart Jubilee Edition, issued by Philips in 1956 to mark the 200th anniversary of Mozart's birth. They apparently come from a pair of the original LPs, one devoted to Mozart's Masonic choral music and one to what were designated as concert arias for bass; many of them are insertion arias or other pieces of operatic miscellany. To judge from the considerable surface noise, the CD was produced from LP copies rather than from master tapes; the sound is not up to what Philips was capable of in the 1950s, and no technical data are provided. The performances, though, are intriguing historical documents. Conductor Bernhard Paumgartner, here at the helm of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, had an outrageous tendency to make Mozart sound like Wagner. Playing Mozart like this is almost a lost art, and the expansive Masonic cantatas from the end of Mozart's life, sacred pieces freed from...
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