Mozart Church Sonata

40 CD box set featuring concerts, quartets, divertimenti, symphonies, arias, opera scenes, famous overtures, sonatas and so much more.

Part of Warner's Mozart 250th Anniversary Edition, this set of 12 discs contains all the complete piano sonatas and violin sonatas, most of the works for piano duet, and several solo piano works. The recordings all date from the late '80s to early '90s and have very good sound. The solo piano works are all performed by Swiss pianist Karl Engel, while the duets are by sisters Güher and Süher Pekinel.

While Kiri Te Kanawa was still preparing for that career-defining debut as the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro, she made her first Mozart disc under Colin Davis: a collection of sacred music, including the Solemn Vespers, KV 339, with its serene setting of ‘Laudate Dominum’, and Exsultate, jubilate. The Countess became the singer’s calling-card, and she repeated the role immediately in San Francisco and at Glyndebourne. The thwarted Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni followed, again under Davis at Covent Garden, before Kiri took her Countess to the Met in New York in February 1976, and sang her first Fiordiligi in Paris, in a production by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle. The Paris Opera was also the location of Kiri’s debut as Pamina in Die Zauberflöte in 1977. Her leap into superstardom came when she sang at the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana in July 1981…