Anne-Sophie Mutter and her husband Andre Previn play three Mozart trios with the help of the young cellist Daniel Muller-Schott on a DVD from Deutsche Grammophon. The trios aren’t often heard, Previn remarks, speaking in German on a 12-minute bonus track (with subtitles in Chinese, English, Spanish and French). And unfortunately they don’t indeed prove very memorable. Mozart wrote a huge amount, and he necessarily wrote some things fast, either for students, for amateur family music-making, or simply to make some much-needed quick money.
Finally, one more concert from Taiwan’s wonderful Evergreen Symphony Orchestra. This one was played in Taipei on Sept. 15 last year, with the current music director, Gernot Schmalfuss, already at the helm. Included in the long program are Beethoven’s First Symphony, Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, Dvorak’s Rondo for Cello and Orchestra (with Sun Hsiao-mei (孫小媚) as soloist), five Schubert songs sung by Liau Chong-boon (廖聰文), and orchestral versions of two Taiwanese folk songs.
It’s a pity the Schubert songs,
performed in their original German, don’t have subtitles. But Liau gives a brief onstage introduction to each of them — probably more of a challenge to a
professional singer than the performances themselves. The entire DVD, almost two hours long, is a delight, as are all these Evergreen concert recordings.



