[SACD-R][OF] Mozart - Complete Sonatas for keyboard & violin, vol. 6 (Gary Cooper & Rachel Podger) - 2009 (Classical/Chamber/Piano/Violin)

Microphones – Bruel & Kjaer 4006, Schoeps
Digital converters – DSD Super Audio / Meitnerdesign AD/DA
Pyramix Editing / Merging Technologies
Speakers – Audio Lab, The Netherlands
Amplifiers – van Medevoort, The Netherlands
Cables – Van den Hul*
mixing board – Rens Heijnis, custom design
Mastering Room:
Speakers – B+W 803d series
Amplifier – Classe 5200
Cables – Van den Hul

The duo partnership Gary Cooper & Rachel Podger has taken them worldwide. These recordings of Mozart’s Complete Sonatas for Keyboard & Violin have received countless awards & accolades, including multiple Diapason d’Or awards & Gramophone Editor’s Choices, & hailed as ‘benchmark’ recordings.
“Finally, one asks why there hasn’t previously been a complete recording on historical instruments. From my ‘privileged’ position as listener-in-chief, I can tell you it is because no pair can make such transparent & difficult music sound so effortless, elegant, witty, emotionally persuasive & enjoyable.
~ Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, producer.
Anyone thinking of Mozart as a performer probably imagines him at a harpsichord or fortepiano, an accurate picture. Mozart was a gifted keyboard player, but not a showman of the keyboard. He detested empty virtuosity. Wolfgang, however, had been trained from his earliest years by his father Leopold as a double talent. He played both harpsichord & violin. The popularity of his sonatas, variation sets, & concerti for the piano has tended to overshadow his violin compositions, but the 1st sounds that his baby ears received probably came from his father’s violin. Wolfgang heard him tuning the instrument, saw him putting on new strings now & then, playing, rehearsing. He heard Leopold praising his violin & commenting on the music. Until Wolfgang moved to Vienna in 1781, the sound of the violin had accompanied him virtually every day of his life, for Leopold had been with him almost constantly……..
For some 25 years, between the ages of 8 & 32, Mozart’s oeuvre included sonatas for violin & piano. The earliest works, small-scale rococo trifles in which the violin played a subsidiary part & the keyboard (virtually certain to be a harpsichord at that date) was the star performer, date from the time of his 1st major tour through Europe. Leopold Mozart had 4 of these early sonatas published in Paris in 1764, 2 as opus 1 & 2 as opus 2. In the following year, he had another series of 6 sonatas published in London as opus 3. Yet another series of 6 sonatas, opus 4, written in the Hague by Wolfgang (& possibly by Leopold?) in 1766, appeared that same year, both there & in Amsterdam. Then Mozart’s production of violin & piano sonatas was interrupted by a 12-year silence. Not until his stay in Mannheim in 1777 & 1778 would he complete 4 new sonatas, in which the violin’s role had grown considerably, offering a genuine partnership to the piano. In the summer of 1778, Mozart added 2 more new sonatas to the series of 6 Paris sonatas, & published the set there as Opus 1, as if he intended his mature oeuvre to begin at this point. Then, after another interval of 3 years, came the 6 sonatas published in 1781 as Opus 2 by Artaria in Vienna, Mozart’s new & ultimate place of residence. One of the pieces had been composed in Mannheim, & another presumably dated back to Salzburg. Mozart composed the other 4 sonatas in the summer of 1781 in Vienna. Four more violin sonatas, his last works in the genre, were composed, also in Vienna, between 1784 & 1788……