Mozart by Radio Classique

Mozart by Radio Classique is another app I grabbed when it was free for a day. Right now it is listed at $3.99. There are three different sections of the app:

Story - This is a narrated and slightly animated story of Mozart's life. You have the option to look at the text as it is being read to you, but you need to pull down a tab on each page to do that and it does cover up part of the illustration. The information is good, but the narration bothers me. It is very stilted, robot-like as if it is being read by a computer and not a recording of someone. There are some things that are pronounced strangely (27th sounds like twenty-thevents). If I were using this in the classroom, I would mute it and read it myself, which means you don't get the nice Mozart background music, but it's better than the irritating narration

Works - There are excerpts of The Marriage of Figaro, The Magic Flute (2), Requiem (2), Ah vous dirai-je maman, Symphony 38, 3rd mvt, Clarinet Concerto, and Abduction from Seraglio. Having these excerpts at your finger tips may be worth the price of the app since you could not purchase all of those on iTunes for less than $3.99.

Games - This contains a multiple choice quiz based on the information in the story, instrument cards to which you match the correct sound of the instrument, a Where's Waldo-esque game of searching for specific items in a picture., and game called Notes which is like the old game Simon where you watch and listen to notes that are illuminated and then play them back in the same order. One thing I noticed about the instrument cards game is that the tuba is called the bass horn. I think this app may have been developed in France and instruments may have different names there.

The developers of this app have also created an app about Beethoven.