By Nicola Christie [The Independent, 28 December 2010]
The first 12 days of January on BBC Radio 3 are going to feature Mozart, back-to-back. If the programmers were braver, they would have gone for Franz Liszt instead. Austrian demi-god, the first popstar, a 19th-century wonder who transcribed the entire set of Beethoven symphonies for piano – just to get them out – “saved” Wagner’s operas from extinction when the composer himself was in exile, and generally changed the course of the music world forever.