Customer Rating: 
Summary: Very good music in a carefully built box set
Comment: I don't know much about classical music and I never had the habit to lissen to it, but after watching the film Amadeus and hearing to a CD collection of the greatest works of Mozart, I wanted to know more about his music and also about classical music. I then decided to buy this Mozart Complete Box Set.
For a novice like me it is perfect. It's cheap and the quality is good. The first CD of the set contains some PDF files, one for each volume. Inside each PDF there are sections for each CD of the volume. The sections tell the background of the musics in every CD, telling when it was composed, what kind of imfluences mozart had at the time and things like that. The PDF of the volume of Symphonies starts by telling what a symphony is and how the term evolved, for example. The "speechs" of all the actors is also present for the operas in the Operas volume.
I think the set was carefully built and the paper case for each CD is well labeled and color coded. In the back of each CD's case there is the list of "songs" with the corresponding time of each part and the total time of the CD.
Someone said here there is a track missing in one CD (Vol 1, CD 8). Well, it is true that the actual CD track is missing, there are only 10 tracks in the CD, but 11 movements listed at the back of the CD cover. But the Finale/Presto of the Haffner Symphony is not missing. They put the last two movements of the symphony in one CD track, the track number 10. The cover lists track 10 with 3:04 min and track 11 with 4:16 min, but the CD has only track number 10 with 7:20 min.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not just cheap, an enjoyable bargain set
Comment: This set is so inexpensive (for 170 CDs) that you may be suspicious about the quality. I have now played about 25-30 of the 170 discs in this set. I have had fun exploring the lesser-known pieces, often just making a random blind grab from the box. I have found the music generally enjoyable, well-played and well-recorded.
I cannot claim that the performances are necessarily the equal of the very best recordings of individual works. For example, I generally prefer the Perahia piano concertos, the Uchida piano sonatas, the symphonies conducted by Mackeras, Szell, etc., to the versions included in this box. But that seems entirely beside the point when this 170 CD set costs so little. I can enjoy listening to a good performance of good music, even if I know that there might be a better performance out there. If your expectations are adjusted to the price point, as mine were, your reaction upon receiving the set may be similar to mine -- pleasant surprise that so much of the music is so well played and recorded. Some of the musicians -- many Dutch -- were unfamiliar to me, but sprinkled through you will find Sir Colin Davis, Gerd Seifert, and some other names that you may recognize.
I have discovered various obscure masses and chamber music that I had not previously collected but that I definitely would play again. So far, I have found only one disc that I would be unlikely to repeat, the single disc containing "Der Schauspieldirektor", a singspiel opera. (My complaint lay not with the performance, or the recording, but with the dated work itself, which has little appeal to me. Der Schauspieldirektor consists of a few short musical numbers embedded in about 40 minutes of tedious spoken German). But I listened (with a little fast forwarding) and, at least, I now know why it is not played today.
The majority of the recordings appear to be digital, with some of the operas being earlier analog recordings of the 1960s or 1970s. I thought the quality of the sound was generally fine.
Although the CDs in this set are inexpensively packaged in paper envelopes, with no jewel cases, there are some advantages to the packaging. The set is compact upon your shelf. The music is color-coded by category, and numbered and labeled within each category. The inside top cover of the attractive cardboard box that contains all of the CDs and envelopes provides a printed listing of the contents. Frankly, I found myself wishing that the rest of my collection was organized similarly.
There are no booklets or printed essays but there is a CD-ROM with essays on the works and artist bios. The detailed essays are more than I would have expected in a bargain set. However, they are not especially handy on a CD-ROM. Nevertheless, there was probably no other feasible alternative at this price, and it is better to have the essays in an inconvenient place than not to have them at all.
Many of the recent reviews here for this complete Mozart set concentrate mostly on price, specifically, where to find the best deal among the Amazon web sites in different countries. Those reviews are definitely worth reading although I believe the price advertised right here on the US Amazon.com site may have fallen since some of those reviews were posted.
Overall, a very pleasant surprise and a good value, in my opinion.
Customer Rating:
Summary: it's even cheaper at the german amazon site.
Comment: after going through the checkout, this is even cheaper than at the french amazon site.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant Editions can have Missing CDs, so be careful!
Comment: I've bought 5 Brilliant sets so far - the 170 CD Mozart and 4 of the 40-CD sets of other composers - and in three of the five purchases there was a CD missing! One of the 170 Mozart CDs was duplicated with another CD instead, and the same thing happened in two of my 40 CD sets. And Brilliant doesn't make a replacement easy. So check every CD number against the CD number on the slipcase right after you purchase it so you can return it in time! I checked my Mozart set after purchasing it and thought all was well, but after 2 bad Brilliant 40-CD sets I checked my 170-CD Mozart set again tonight several months after buying it and sure enough, it too was missing a CD! So quality control is a BIG Brilliant problem at least as far as assemblage goes. The music is mostly pretty good quality... if you manage to get a complete set!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not available in France at the price given here?
Comment: Maybe I'm clueless, but I can't find this for sale at Amazon.de at all, and on Amazon.fr it lists at 145 euros. What's going on? When I find it for sale at a reasonable price I'll retract this and give the fifth star...
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