Nikolaus Harnoncourt is credited with making historical performance practice respectable in Salzburg. His memorable debut concert in 1980 was the prelude to a long string of successes that culminated in the Mozart Week 2006, when Harnoncourt was Artist in Residence and gave his acclaimed ceremonial address on 27 January on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. The inaugural concert and rehearsals from 2006 can be heard on this album. The 3-Discs edition covers the period of Harnoncourt’s influence on the interpretation of Mozart’s music.

One of the most welcome releases of the year is Nikolaus Harnoncourt's new "Messiah" with the Concentus Musicus Wien… what makes this recording so satisfying is the warmth, serenity and pliant lyricism of the performance. We have come to expect fleet tempos from the early-music movement. If anything, Mr. Harnoncourt's tempos, over all, are spacious. The sweet-voiced tenor Michael Schade is given such freedom to shape the phrases of the accompanied recitative "Comfort ye my people," that you listen to these words as if you had never heard them before…The soprano Christine Schäfer and the alto Anna Larsson also do radiant and affecting work. The chorus sings with impressive clarity and full-bodied yet unforced sound…Mr. Harnoncourt adheres to the manuscripts and editions of the work he deems the most reliable, especially with regard to the size of the string ensembles in the various movements. But you will not be thinking about scholarly matters while listening to this revelatory recording.

The word ‘vision’ is much misused these days yet to talk of Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s ‘view’ of Anton Bruckner’s Fifth won’t quite do. This is more a realisation than an interpretation, musically vivid but spiritually serene.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt has spent more than sixty years exploring Mozart's last three symphonies. The present album represents the results of this engagement. It is also his first recording of these three works with his own "instrument", the Concentus Musicus Wien. This is a recording not of three independent works but of a single work in three sections: an "Instrumental Oratorium".

This release celebrates the partnership of the distinguished conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt (1929-2016) directing the Chamber Orchestra of Europe (COE) in a memorable cycle of the complete Schubert Symphonies at the Styriarte Festival in Graz, Austria during July 1988. Harnoncourt was a notable and perhaps controversial Schubertian who, with his favourite orchestra, set about examining everything afresh. The players he worked with in 1988 talk about the way he changed their perceptions, of discovering Schubert’s work for themselves, ignoring the accretions of previous performance tradition.

Something new is always to be expected whenever Nikolaus Harnoncourt turns his attention to an important piece of music. In recent years he has been giving audiences a fresh view on some of the masterpieces of Romantic and late-Romantic music. His account of Brahms’ German Requiem is based on a thorough study of the composer’s ideas on how it should be performed.

It is immediately evident from the Overture that the orchestral sound is going to be rich and ponderous, and, although Harnoncourt works wonders in varying the dynamics and getting the rhythms to dance…the effect is more suggestive of those gigantic mid-Victorian Handel events in the Crystal Palace than anything that Mozart, let alone Handel, could have imagined.