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I am presenting to you a truly discographical event: the last album recorded by the late Italian conductor Claudio Abbado, who left us at the age of 80 years old on 20^th January, 2014. It is an album that is also part of the Vote the Best Classical Album of 2014 campaign.

The release of the Mozart album recorded by Claudio Abbado together with the pianist Martha Argerich and the Mozart Orchestra was initially scheduled on February 17^th, but it was brought forward on February 10^th, 2014. Today you will be listening for the first time in Romania, to this album that promises to become an icon in the discographical world. I do not think it was random that the conductor Claudio Abbado’s first album released by Deutsche Grammophon Records about 50 years ago, in 1967, also contained piano concerts performed together with Martha Argerich. Destiny made it so that the first and the last albums of the charismatic conductor to include some of the most famous piano and orchestra concerts by Prokofiev, Ravel, and this last album, by Mozart.

Today we will be listening to concerts no. 25 and 20 by Mozart, recordings from the live concert held at the Lugano Festival in 2013.

For almost 50 years, Martha Argerich and Claudio Abbado collaborated many times and the albums they worked on together made a necessary reference point. But in 2014, after the release of an album with compositions by Beethoven, Martha Argerich and Claudio Abbado are not on the same album cover again, and the one that was released on 10^th February, 2014, was said to be an actual comeback after ten years.

Martha Argerich and Claudio Abbado – always a joyful collaboration: a pianist that has always been thought of as unconventional, with her own style that now resembles a diamond polished with great skill; a conductor who was like a noble Prospero reigning elegantly over the entire world. There is so much sensitivity and also determination in their performance. Abbado’s influence can be easily seen in the wonderful Mozart Orchestra that he created in his last ten years of activity. We are faced with a performance that I think even Mozart would have agreed with the interpretation of his concerts: balanced, honest and fresh.