Announced at the beginning of 2017, the Mozartists are an offshoot of Classical Opera, an ensemble formed by British conductor Ian Page to explore the operatic world of Mozart and his contemporaries. The Mozartists have the intention of adding instrumental music to the company's capabilities, and they have been closely associated with Page's ongoing Mozart 250 project, aimed at recording a wide swath of music by Mozart and other composers in his orbit. Page began his career in the choir at Westminster Abbey and studied English literature at the University of York before switching to the Royal Academy of Music. He apprenticed at opera companies in Britain and Sweden before founding Classical Opera, where he has conducted most of Mozart's operas including the original version of Mitridate, re di Ponto, K. 87, and a new completion of Zaide, K. 344, in world premieres. The Mozartists ensemble, expanding the company's reach into concert work, coincided with the company's 20th anniversary in 2017. They got their recording career off to a fast start, signing with the Signum label that year and releasing Perfido!, a collection of operatic rarities by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven with soprano Sophie Bevan. In 2018 that was followed by Mozart in London, a double album exploring not only the music written by Mozart as a child (during his 15-month sojourn in London) but the music that he would have heard there. The latter group encompassed a number of world premieres, a category frequently represented in Classical Opera's and the Mozartists' performances and recordings. Mozart 250 is planned to extend over a quarter-century and to cover all of Mozart's important works, instrumental as well as operatic. The Mozartists' 2017 performances under that rubric included an overview of the year 1767, when Mozart began to write opera for the first time at age 11, and featured works by J.C. Bach, Gluck, Haydn, Karl Friedrich Abel, Thomas Arne, and Florian Gassmann. Other performances that year included the early Mozart operas Die Schuldigkeit des ersten Gebots, K. 35, and Apollo et Hyacinthus, K. 38. ~ James Manheim, Rovi