Amadeus (Director's Cut) (Neville Marriner) [2 CD]

The Academy Award®-sweeping film Amadeus wisely pinned much of its dramatic thrust on Mozart's gloriously eternal music, and its soundtrack remains a concise yet rewarding introduction to Wolfgang's spectacular oeuvre. This newly remastered "Director's Cut" edition is a companion to the expanded DVD and features 24-bit encoding on two 24-karat-gold discs, sharpening the sonic clarity of the performances of Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields to near perfection. The performances (which, Marriner notes, crucially served as templates during actual production) have also been augmented to match the expanded new video edition and include a new, 2001 recording of the Adagio in C Minor for Glass Armonica, K. 617. --Jerry McCulley