Mozart: London Sketchbook

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Cat No: 8554769

Release Date: 02 January 2003

Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 636943476925

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: MOZART

Description
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)London Sketchbook, K15a-ss (Realised by Hans-Udo Kreuels)On 9th June 1763 the Mozart family set off on a grand tour of Europe, returning to Salzburg after nearly three-and-a-half years’ absence. Their journey took them as far afield as London where the Mozarts stayed for some fifteen months. There the young Wolfgang met Johann Christian Bach, whose music exerted a profound influence on him, and he played, with his sister Nannerl, to audiences ranging from the King and his immediate family to the fashionable set who frequented the celebrated Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens. During these years of travel Mozart absorbed a bewildering range of new musical styles and made rapid progress as a composer. As early as May 1764, a few weeks after their arrival in London, Leopold Mozart wrote: "What he knew when we left Salzburg is a mere shadow compared with what he knows now. It exceeds all that one can imagine"; and on 8th June he proudly observed: "My boy knows in this his eighth year what one would expect only from a man of forty". The pieces on this recording represent some of Mozart’s earliest efforts at composition. Unlike his very first works, which were written out by Leopold Mozart who also, no doubt, assisted here and there in their composition, the pieces in the London Sketchbook were composed entirely by Mozart. Many of them were not completed - they were sketched out or left in draft form - but only three were left as fragments. Most of the pieces contain errors or omissions of some sort, some of which are minor slips, others the result of Mozart’s as yet imprecise grasp of the finer points of musical notation. Nonetheless one is struck immediately by the fertility of the young Mozart’s imagination and the rapidity of his musical development. The London Sketchbook, perhaps more than any of the other manuscripts of the period, reveals Mozart’s expanding musical horizons. The sketchbook begins with a short keyboard piece and ends with a fugal exercise; by the time he had finished using the sketchbook Mozart was already the composer of several symphonies. The inside cover of the London Sketchbook is signed [in Leopold Mozart’s hand] "di Wolfgango Mozart, à Londra 1764". The sketchbook contains around forty pieces, the first 25 of which are written in pencil and the remainder in ink. Scholars believe that the first group of pieces was probably composed during the period from April to December 1764 and the second group between January and July 1765. Some of the pieces were composed during Leopold Mozart’s illness when, according to Nannerl, she and her brother were forbidden from playing the harpsichord. This may account for some of the technical oddities found in a number of the pieces, but I believe that, in some instances at least, these indicate that the pieces concerned were not originally conceived for keyboard. In view of the incompleteness of much of the mater
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