The Jupiter Project

My new Hyperion CD, The Jupiter Project, is now released. The New York Times featured the recording.

Reviewers’ comments:

An unmitigated triumph …. required listening.
David Threasher Gramophone

A fascinating CD, admirable throughout.
Susan Miron ArtsFuse

This work (the finale of Mozart’s last Symphony) is tricky enough – especially in the breathtaking counterpoint of the finale – when played as a piano duet. Performing it with only two hands, in an arrangement that preserves nearly every polyphonic strand, is a brilliant tour de force, with the invaluable bonus of the finale’s second repeat being taken, heightening the effect of the work’s cathartic coda.
David Threasher Gramophone

My great expectations have been completely met!
Maximilian Burgdörfer MusicWeb International

Norman Lebrecht’s comment: ‘Yes, yes, yes!’

Here’s the MusicWeb review. And here’s the Gramophone.

The Jupiter Ensemble’s next project is Beethoven, Wordsworth, & the French Revolution, marking the 250th anniversaries of Beethoven & Wordsworth (both born in 1770). You can see this programme at the Turner Sims, Southampton, on January 9th 2020, with Wordsworth’s political poetry read by Zeb Soanes.

Some background:
Mozart: the Virtuoso’s View
As Mozart’s reputation grew in the nineteenth century, three great virtuosos of the pianoforte recomposed his overtures, symphonies and concertos, adding many more notes to suit a more flamboyant style of playing on a much larger instrument. But instead of a full orchestra, Clementi, Cramer and Hummel wrote for a quartet of piano, violin, flute and cello. On nineteenth-century instruments the results are both exciting and beautiful.

It was Clementi’s 1823 arrangement of Mozart’s last symphony that first named it ‘The Jupiter’, which certainly shows how influential these recompositions and arrangements were. They were all published in London, where the piano/violin/flute/cello ensemble was enormously popular: Haydn & Beethoven symphonies, overtures from Auber to Weber, selections from oratorios and opera, and even the Mendelssohn Octet!