Harnoncourt on Teldec: the Journey Begins

1980 photograph of Nikolaus Harnoncourt at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw in September of 1980 (photograph by Marcel Antonisse for Anefo, from a Wikimedia Commons Web page, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

A little less than one month from today, Warner Classics will release its next anthology. The Amazon.com Web page lists the title as The Complete Teldec Recordings, identifying the artist on all of the 42 CDs as the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt. He leads the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra on all of these recorded performances. The release date is scheduled for next month on September 25. However, because Amazon takes pre-orders, I decided to account for the contents in this collection sooner rather than later!

The first 30 of the CDs account for three of the four “First Viennese School” composers, the “order of appearance” being Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Joseph Haydn, and Franz Schubert. (I was struck by the absence of the most familiar of those composers, but Harnoncourt may have decided that there are already enough, if not too many, recordings of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven!) Mozart accounts for the “lion’s share” of those CDs; and it is large enough that I decided that it deserves two separate articles, one for the instrumental music and one for the operas. Having established my plan, let me begin (as they say) at the beginning!

That “beginning” accounts for Mozart’s orchestral compositions. There are nine CDs, the last two of which involve piano concertos performed by Friedrich Gulda. The other seven account for fifteen of the 41 symphonies, the earliest of which is the K. 183 (25th) symphony in G minor. It is paired with the “other” (and better-known) G minor symphony, K. 550 (number 40). These are coupled on the first CD in the collection, beginning with the more familiar K. 550. I have to say that I rather liked this ordering. Pretty much everyone knows K. 550, but I always enjoy an opportunity to listen to the freshness of K. 183.

Sadly, my past encounters with Harnoncourt have been limited. Nevertheless, I have Warner Classics to thank for my last article about him, which goes back to October of 2021. This was when I was writing about another Warner Classics anthology: Gidon Kremer: The Warner Collection. Harnoncourt was the conductor for all of the Mozart performances, which, sadly, were more limited than I would have wished! I was reminded that, as I put it in my Kremer article:

Harnoncourt was an early champion of historically informed performances, having founded the Concentus Musicus Wien in the Fifties. These recordings [of Mozart] were made in the Eighties, by which time Harnoncourt had expanded his repertoire to music from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thus, while the instrumentation may not be “historically informed,” there is no questioning that the spirit of the music has been honored.

The “next stage” in listening to this new anthology will involve five of the Mozart operas, and I am definitely looking forward to all of them!