Mozart, The Three Last Symphonies – Simon Rattle & Berliner Philharmoniker

Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker take on a myth with their complete performance of the last three symphonies by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

To this day we still don’t know for what occasion they were written, when they were first performed, or even whether the composer himself ever heard them. For the Romantics, these three scores represented Mozart’ legacy to posterity – but for Rattle they signify an interpretive challenge of the first order: “Here human emotions are pushed to the absolute extreme,” he explains. “You have the feeling that you’re conducting three very concentrated operas in the same evening.” Mozart’s music is for him in any case incomparable: “It is deeply emotional and passionate and dark and dangerous and cheerful like no other music that has ever been written. If you approach it with caution, you really have a problem. Everything in this music is so natural that you have to forget the rules.”

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Symphony No. 39 in E-flat major, KV 543
Symphony No. 40 in G minor, KV 550
Symphony No. 41 in C major, KV 551 “Jupiter”

Berliner Philharmoniker
Sir Simon Rattle, conductor