Mozart 225: classical stars pick their favourite Wolfgang Amadeus wonder

The year’s biggest music release is surely a 200-CD box set containing everything – or as near as possible – Mozart wrote, released 225 years after the composer’s death on 5 December 1791. We asked a handful of the 600 stars who feature on the recordings to pick their desert-island pieces.

Renée Fleming (soprano)

I could never choose just one Mozart piece, but Idomeneo would be near the top. I remember snagging a standing room ticket to hear Anthony Rolfe Johnson in this opera. I heard humanity incarnate in that music: leadership, goodness, and the meaning and use of power; all wrought by Mozart aged only 24. As a Juilliard student the Da Ponte trilogy at the Metropolitan Opera with the great singers of the day left an indelible impression on me. Those works showed me what opera could be – encompassing the full spectrum of human existence, most especially the things that do not change. Who has matched Mozart’s brilliance in the Act II finale of Figaro, the soulful distress of the Countess, and the bursting boyhood of Cherubino? Or, in Cosi fan Tutte, the distinct musical portrayal of the loves of two different couples?

Alfred Brendel (pianist, writer, poet)

The “Jeunehomme” piano concerto K271 is Mozart’s first great masterpiece. He was 21 when he composed it, and he was not a teenage genius like Mendelssohn. It is as if his earlier concertos are by another composer. Here, though, suddenly there is a structure and the most wonderful ideas, formal ideas, and a vision of everything the classical piano concerto could become, in subtlety and richness. For me, it is a perfect work, with that special freshness of something done for the first time and succeeding at the same time. I even find that he did not surpass this piece in the later piano concertos.

Francesco Piemontesi (pianist)

I got to know the Sinfonia Concertante K364 by chance – at the end of the Peter Greenaway film Drowning by Numbers one hears the whole second movement accompanying the final sequence. I was transfixed by the sonority Mozart brings out of the two solo instruments, by the construction and the interplay of the musical phrases, the daring harmonies and the orchestration, and the way these elements are combined to create such a unique atmosphere. I can’t think of another composition of Mozart that moves me more deeply. Like the smile of the Mona Lisa one never knows if the dark side of the piece actually grins at you, and if the grief is at the same time a consolation. Great masterworks often suggest many meanings but this one keeps on telling me a different story every time I listen to it.

Anne Sofie von Otter (mezzo soprano)

For me, the Mozart eye- (and ear-)opener was Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s recordings of Idomeneo and the symphonies. What layers of drama, passion, sensuality and wonder lie there waiting to be discovered! Singing-wise, it was the role of Sesto in La Clemenza di Tito that made me a Mozart fan. It’s such a rich role musically speaking, chunks of meaty recitative, with two of the most wonderful arias ever written and plenty of ensembles. But ultimately my top prize goes to Idomeneo with its orchestral colours and daring through-composition, a beautiful, moving and very suitable drama to take to a desert island.

Dame Mitsuko Uchida (pianist)

The Piano Concerto in C Minor, K491 no 24 has a mysterious, bleakly dark grandeur. To me, it’s clear he wrote the opening by twisting around the opening of the Fantasy in C minor K475 – it is so haunting and shocking. Mozart uses the different emotional colours of the winds very cleverly. That bleakness of the flute in the first movement gives me shivers every time I hear it, while there are those wonderful, almost warm-sounding clarinet sections in A flat major in the slow movement, and then – the most amazing moment after all the darkness – the way the C major variations begin in the oboe in the Finale. The whole piece is so inspired.

Trevor Pinnock (conductor)

I was about 16 when I was transported to a new world by a recording of Bruno Walter conducting three very contrasted symphonies by Mozart: in G minor K183, A major K201 and C major K200. I now know most of Mozart’s symphonies so well that I would be happy to carry them to a desert island in my memory, but for a musical postcard to slip in my pocket I would take Mozart’s Symphony in E flat K184. Eight minutes of pure delight.

Robert Levin (fortepianist)

There are so many Mozart desert-island pieces (the terzettino from Così fan tutte, the slow movement of the G major violin concerto, Martern aller Arten from Die Entführung aus dem Serail, the slow movement from the String Quintet K593 for starters) that the choice of a single one is a cruel task. A different day, a different choice. Today’s is the middle movement of the A major concerto K488 – the only piece Mozart ever wrote in the desolate key of F sharp minor. A more heartbreaking musical utterance is inconceivable, although Beethoven rendered it full homage in the slow movement of his “Hammerklavier” Sonata.

Sir Neville Marriner (the late conductor gave us his thoughts earlier this year)

I’d name the rarely performed work, his sacred drama Die Schuldigkeit des ersten Gebots K35, which embraces all the youthful charm of the 11-year old Mozart; but my favourite work: the Requiem. That Mozart left it incomplete makes it all the more affecting. While the day of judgment and hope for salvation are expressed in quite austere idioms, it is music of such dynamism that you can understand its place in the heart of most Mozart lovers, and forgive those composers and editors who have tried to become part of this work with their additions and subtractions. The fabric of the work is the essence of Mozart – the composer who ultimately provides the most sophisticated human emotional experience of all.

• Mozart 225: the New Complete Edition is out now on Decca and Deutsche Grammophon