Mozart: Symphony No.40 In G Minor, K.550; Symphony No.41 In C Major, "The Jupiter"

By the time he wrote his final pair of symphonies, Mozart had an intense and prolific career as an opera composer, and his command of dramatic pacing, emotional extremes and light-hearted interludes makes itself felt in his non-vocal music, too. Don Giovanni, in which two violent deaths frame a farcical series of aborted seductions mistaken identities, makes a good model for the pathos and pirouettes of the G minor symphony. The "Jupiter" is loftier stuff, intricate in construction, expansive in ambition and exhilarating in its sumptuously contrapuntal finale.