“For a musician, there could hardly be a more perilous task than completing works left unfinished by Mozart,” writes Zachary Woolfe in Friday’s (3/26) New York Times. “What began as a musicological lark for [Timothy] Jones, a Mozart expert who teaches at the Royal Academy of Music in London, has now been captured on disc. His completions of several fragments for violin and keyboard were released on Friday on the Channel Classics label, played by the violinist Rachel Podger and, on fortepiano, Christopher Glynn. Posthumous completions are not unheard-of in the classical world…. The new Mozart-Jones recording is unusual … Jones, testing different aspects of Mozartian style, made multiple completions of each fragment, and the album includes some of that variety … Jones got into the completions game while researching a book about Mozart’s late career. Looking into the master’s sketches—over 100 instrumental fragments survive from his final decade—and how they fit in with the canonical works, Jones became fascinated…. Recent research … helped date them more precisely, allowing Jones to be focused in exploring the circumstances in which Mozart created them…. ‘Putting the hubris aside,’ he added, ‘I’d much rather Mozart had finished these pieces than I.’ ”
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