Source: Deutsche Grammophon Mozart Symphony No. 40 (1977) - Wiener Philharmoniker - Karl Bohm 413547-2.

Welcome to my CD collection. YouTube's highest bit rate is 320kbps. You are always encouraged to purchase the original CDs from retail outlets for the best in sound experience. I've uploaded the four separate Movements of this recording into four individual YouTube videos. This upload contains all 4 Movements in one listening session. Enjoy!

Mozart’s last three symphonies, despite the striking contrast between them, form a unified group as regards the history of their composition. Together with several other works, they were written within the amazingly short period of about six weeks between June and August 1788. We know of no external reason for the composition of these symphonies, and they do not appear to have been performed during Mozart’s lifetime. Possibly he intended them for performance during his concert tour in 1790, but here is no proof of this, and such indications as we have make it seem unlikely. On the other hand, these symphonies appear to have been composed with particular occasions in mind, judging by the fact that they differ in their orchestration: while Mozart scored the Symphony in E flat major, K. 543, with clarinets but without oboes from the outset, he later revised the Symphony in G minor, K. 550, to add two B flat clarinets, altering the oboe parts accordingly. The Symphony in C major was written without clarinets, and remained unaltered.

With the G minor Symphony, which Robert Schumann admired for its “floating Grecian grace”, Mozart took a great stride forward into the 19th-century world of feeling. The first movement owes its unique momentum to the exploitation of the energy created by a semitone motive, as is particularly evident during the development section. The poignant, chromatic second subject leads to a modulatory phrase, which is also derived from the semitone motive. The festive verve of the Minuet contains suggestions of Bacchantic abandon, while the finale, with themes soaring in the manner of the Mannheim symphonists (the Mannheim “rockets”), remains closer than the other three movements to a traditional pattern.
The attempt has been made to relate all the movements of the “Jupiter” Symphony to a hidden cantus firmus formula, thus revealing a basic thematic row for this last of Mozart’s symphonies (C-D-F-E-A-G-F-E-D-C). Undoubtedly the themes do suggest the influence of such a basic formula, and indeed it appears note-for-note in the last movement (first violin part), but there is no concrete proof that it underlies the entire work.
Unquestionably, however, all four movements are closely related in subject matter – not as a result of intellectual calculation, but because this was Mozart’s intuitive concept of the symphony’s unmistakably cyclic construction. The first movement opens in traditional style, yet the subsidiary theme is that of a comic song, based as it is on the aria “Un bacio di mano” which Mozart had written for Albertarelli. In contrast to this, the last movement, often described as the “final fugue”, has all the formal perfection of Mozart’s mature symphonic style. It has long been realized that this finale, despite its prominent use of strict contrapuntal writing, is actually a movement in sonata form rather than a fugue. This imposing conclusion to the work, with its dazzling display of contrapuntal mastery, reveals a change in Mozart’s attitude towards the function of a finale, as he gave this one sufficient substance to balance what had traditionally been the weightiest part of a symphony, its first movement. –Heinz Becker (Translation: John Coombs)

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