Mozart - Solemn Vespers Collegium Instrumentale Brugense. Capella Brugensis

YOU can't beat a bit of Mozart. I say, you can't beat a bit of Mozart.

What always amazes me is that the young genius is supposed to have heard his works in his head, fully formed, and a lot of them were just written down that way, with all the orchestral parts noted simultaneously.

A bit like Paul McCartney waking up with Yesterday going round his head, only magnified a hundred fold.

Mozart wrote most of his church music for the Dom (cathedral) at Salzburg where he was born and where his father Leopold was employed.

And in Salzburg - surrounded by mountains and wandering the series of little squares under the copper cupolas - you can understand where Mozart's airy melodies, his light touch, was born.

The two go hand-in-hand.

This CD features three of his many church works: a dixit and magnificat from 1774 (he was 18 and a musical veteran, for goodness sakes!), his vesperae solennes de Dominica, penned in the same year as the better known Coronation Mass, and a vesperae solennes de Confessore in the late 1770s.

All three follow a recognisable Mozart form.

They are highly listenable pieces and you can hear how much pleasure the singers and musicians from the Capella and Collegium enjoyed performing them.

Mozart may sometimes ask a lot from his performers, but it is always worth it.

Saying that, none of these works is memorable in the way that the Mozart horn concerto, or his Ave Verum, or the Requiem, or Marriage of Figaro are memorable.

Some composers would give their eye teeth to write music like this - for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart it was just journeyman stuff.

But what journeyman stuff.

Naxos

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