Mozart & Jones: Violin Sonatas Fragment Completions

Album review

• World premiere recordings of six Sonata-Allegros and a Fantasia for violin and piano.

• Fragments composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, completed by Timothy Jones.

• First collaboration of Rachel Podger with pianist Christopher Glynn on Channel Classics.

• Each Sonata Fragment comes with two different completions. The Fantasia with one completion.

Baroque violinist Rachel Podger and Grammy Award winning pianist Christopher Glynn have recorded an album of previously unfinished Mozart violin sonatas, completed by Professor Timothy Jones. This album of world premiere recordings features four particularly beautiful fragments for violin and piano that were left incomplete following Mozart’s untimely death. Alongside their careers as celebrated musicians, performers, and educators, all three artists hold senior teaching positions at the Royal Academy of Music.

With the release of Mozart/Jones: Violin Sonatas Fragment Completions, Rachel continues her Mozart Sonatas series that began in 2004. This ninth disc concludes the highly acclaimed project, and it is Rachel’s 27th release for Channel Classics Records produced by Academy Principal, Professor Jonathan Freeman-Attwood.

Describing the completion process, Professor Timothy Jones said:

“(...) At the heart, I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to ‘perform’ the notation in the same way that it seems Mozart did – to write very fast and in a particular hierarchical way; if I paid detailed analytical attention to the immediate stylistic context of each fragment; and, noting that Mozart never repeats himself, if I applied the principle of stylistic models, not their letter. Of course, I have no idea how Mozart might have worked these fragments into finished pieces. So an important part of the project was to undertake multiple completions of each fragment (...)”