One of the 20th c. greatest interpreters of the works of his contemporary Richard Strauss, W.A. Mozart, and the Austro-German masterworks more generally, the conductor Karl Böhm (1894-1981 was nearly halfway through his long Vienna Philharmonic association when this now historic 1956 Mono recording of Mozart's Requiem, KV626 was realized. The quartet of soloists - Teresa Stich-Randall, Ira Malaniuk, Waldemar Kmentt and Kurt Böhme - among the greatest Mozartian singers of the era, plus the sterling bonus 1957 Beethoven Choral Fantasy, op. 80, insure this disc's import.