When these recordings were taken in 1952 and 1956, Clara Haskil was still climbing to stardom. Her perceptive artistry put her in a class above other pianists, and gave her the ability to interpret Mozart’s music in such an organic, natural way that these performances are definitely timeless. This release feature’s Clara Haskil’s performances of Mozart’s Concertos Nos. 9 and 19. Carl Schuricht conducting the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR is equally perceptive in his interpretation of the score, beautifully complimenting Ms. Haskill.

Menahem Pressler has played Mozart’s piano concertos with such frequency that they can be reckoned among the works that have occupied him the most in his life. Fortunately, a wish that Pressler and the musicians of the Magdeburg Philharmonic Orchestra had been having for many years finally came true: in May and December 2016, Pressler performed as a soloist in his hometown. Those performances became this live recording release. He writes: “In Mozart there are no ‘empty’ passages. Musicians often just ‘play through’ a passage because they can play it well, and they are satisfied with that. However, if the interpretation of a passage has no content, I become adamant. I know it’s hard to phrase everything correctly. But I am still as critical as I ever was.” Most of all, one can immediately tell that we are dealing with a pianist who not only knows very note of these concertos, but who has made each of them his own.

To make Mozart’s Piano Concertos K. 466 and K. 467 more accessible to the public, the 19th c. composer Ignaz Lachner left the piano parts untouched and made splendid string quartet transcriptions of the orchestra parts with added bass. These chamber versions of two of Mozart’s greatest and most popular concertos sound almost as natural as if Mozart had transcribed them himself. Admired for his musical intelligence, dynamic personality, artistic vision and innovative programming, the NY Times called out pianist Alon Goldstein’s “brilliance and imagination” following a recent live recital.

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

In May 1784, shortly after completing the two piano concertos recorded here, Mozart described them in a letter to his father as 'concertos which are bound to make the player sweat.’ In his correspondence he also pointed out the particular importance of the wind instruments in the two works. This is obvious already in the first movement of the Concerto in D major, K 451, which opens the disc: for long stretches Mozart revels in the soloistic capabilities of the winds and elsewhere he builds up chordal textures in which the winds’ distinctive colours dominate. In a similar manner, the winds take the lead from the very beginning of the B flat major concerto, K 450, with the strings answering. Throughout the movement, the woodwinds are absolutely vital to the narrative and Mozart playfully exploits the diverse colours of the winds, frequently featuring pairs of them playing in octaves: oboe/bassoon, oboe/horn or horn/bassoon. In the Andante the wind instruments are silent from start, but once they enter they again dominate in terms of colours. The delicacy of the piano writing throughout this movement adds to the very special quality of the concerto, in which Mozart seems to point the way towards Beethoven.

Previous discs in this series have earned distinctions such as Editor’s Choice (Gramophone), IRR Outstanding (International Record Review), ‘10’ (klassik-heute.de) and Disco excepcional (Scherzo). On their eighth instalment, Ronald Brautigam and Die Kölner Akademie have chosen to close the programme with a Rondo in D major, originally intended as a replacement finale for the Piano Concerto No.5, K 175. Offering a range of different moods and introducing a variety of quasi-operatic characters, the Rondo became greatly popular in Vienna and beyond, and was in fact sometimes published as a stand-alone work.

Classical Music

MOZART Piano Concertos: Nos. 21 and 27 • Lars Vogt (pn); Paavo Järvi, cond; Frankfurt RSO • AVI 8553257 (57:52)


In this recording a talented, prolific pianist performs with a celebrated conductor in two Mozart masterpieces. It shouldn’t go wrong, and it doesn’t. There is grace here, sensitivity, and a welcome liveliness. At times Vogt in his solo passages seems to retreat a bit too much, in dynamics and touch. I suppose that from time to time I prefer a crisper touch and more directed succession of phrases to the occasional sighs and whispers. I still swoon before Schnabel’s Mozart recordings. But even here I am afraid of exaggerating. Vogt and Jarvi have produced beautiful, coherent, unaffected recordings of two masterpieces. If I like a little more tension, others will prefer this kind of delicate and nuanced approach.


FANFARE: Michael Ullman

Mozart: Piano Concertos Nos. 20 and 21

MOZART Piano Concertos Nos. 15 and 27 • Martin Helmchen (pn); Gordon Nikoli?, cond; Netherlands CO • PENTATONE 5186508 (SACD: 55:27)


Exactly one year ago, in issue 36:5, I expressed only lukewarm enthusiasm for Martin Helmchen’s solo Schumann disc. I’d not heard (and still haven’t) the pianist’s debut album of Mozart concertos (Nos. 13 and 24), which was received very positively by Steven Ritter, and recommended unreservedly by him in 31:4. With this latest release in Helmchen’s expanding discography, I now have the chance to hear him in two other Mozart concertos, Nos. 15 and 27, both in B? Major.


These two scores, programmed on the same disc, make for an interesting pair of bookends, and not just because they’re both in the same key. The B?-Major Concerto No. 27, K 595—as far as we know, and at least as far as the numbering goes—is Mozart’s last piano concerto. The date on the manuscript, “5 January, 1791,” until fairly recent times, was, accepted as the work’s date of composition. But a close examination of the paper has established an earlier date, no later than 1789 and perhaps as early as 1787. This uncertainty is reflected in the Chronological-Thematic Catalog of the Complete Works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , published in 1964, in which the date of the concerto is given as “?1788–1791, Jan. 5, 1791.” If, in fact, the piece was composed in 1788, it might actually predate the “Coronation” Concerto (No. 26), which would make No. 27 Mozart’s penultimate piano concerto instead of his last one.


About the dating of the other B?-Major Concerto on the disc (No. 15), there is no such uncertainty; it’s dated March 15, 1784; but what makes this score the left-hand bookend in this pairing of works is that it marks the beginning of the series of concertos to which Mozart applied the term “grand.” Presumably, this was “Mozart-speak” for the inclusion of additional instruments in the woodwind section and for their expanded role in the orchestra.


It would be inaccurate to say that Mozart never called for a flute before No. 15; he scored for two of them in his G-Major Concerto (No. 4), K 41, and again in his B?-Major Concerto (No. 6), K 238, something he never did again. Both of those concertos, however, are very sparsely orchestrated, with only two horns plus strings joining the flutes in the former, and two oboes, two horns, and strings joining the flutes in the latter. After that, there are no flutes again until the present Concerto No. 15, and then, only one of them. Indeed, none of the piano concertos going forward ever calls for more than a single flute.


It would also be inaccurate to say that Mozart’s concerto scoring follows a straight line of increasing numbers of instruments. The Concerto No. 13, for example, calls for an orchestra larger than that of No. 15, with two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings. No. 15 uses no oboes, no trumpets, and no timpani. Mozart’s “grandest” concerto of all in terms of scoring is No. 24, the “everything bagel”: flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings. No other Mozart concerto is as heavily scored. In fact, No. 27, presumably his last piano concerto, is almost regressive as far as its instrumentation is concerned: flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, and strings. From this, I think we can safely say that Mozart was highly sensitive to orchestration; that he didn’t pursue a progressive course of enlarging his orchestra, but rather scored according to what he perceived to be the character of the music.


It is accurate to say, however, that beginning with No. 15 a flute appears in every one of the remaining concertos, as do two bassoons and two horns. Clarinets don’t make their first appearance until No. 22, and are then found only twice again, in Nos. 23 and 24. From No. 16 onward, all but Nos. 22 and 23 use two oboes; and trumpets, always paired with timpani, show up in seven of the concertos, beginning with No. 16.


Based on the foregoing, one could posit that No. 15 is either the last of Mozart’s early piano concertos or the first of his late ones, which is why I characterized it as the left-hand bookend to the right-hand one, No. 27.


Martin Helmchen definitely displays an intuitive feel for Mozart I didn’t sense in his Schumann. The composer himself, in a letter to his father, declared his B? Concerto, K 450, to be the most technically difficult he’d written to date, “a concerto to make one sweat,” he wrote. I don’t smell a drop of perspiration in Helmchen’s performance; his runs sound easily even, with every note perfectly weighted and given its due, while his chords, like punchy punctuation marks, articulate phrases and demarcate musical periods with a stride of confidence and authority.


If No. 15 represents the 28-year-old Mozart demonstrating a newfound concerto-writing assurance on two levels—one of demanding greater keyboard virtuosity and the other of endowing the woodwind instruments with an indispensable independence—No. 27 is about something else. One doesn’t usually speak of Mozart’s late works, as one does of Brahms’s, as being autumnal. At 35, Mozart was, after all, still a young man, and probably had no intuition of his rapidly approaching premature demise. Yet, this last piano concerto has about it a breadth and certain mellowness that have something in common with the yet-to-come Clarinet Concerto.


As Ronald Vermeulen’s album note puts it, “The [first] movement’s atmosphere—and for that matter, that of the entire work—is for the most part serene and lyrical, introverted and melancholy.” And later, Vermeulen quotes musicologist and pianist Charles Rosen, who wrote, both the last piano concerto and the Clarinet Concerto are private statements: “The form is never exploited for exterior effect; the tone is always one of intimacy.”


Unlike No. 15, No. 27 is not a concerto for “show,” and Helmchen’s whole demeanor at the keyboard changes to one of poignant tenderness for one of the most sensitive and touching performances of this work I’ve heard.


Mozart provided his own cadenzas for both these concertos, and Helmchen, thankfully, plays them. I say this with a sense of relief, for there have been some real “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” cadenzas written for Mozart’s concertos, like the one Fauré composed for the C-Minor Concerto (No. 24), and which Vassily Primakov imprudently chose for his recording with Simon Gaudenz and the Odense Symphony Orchestra on Bridge.


It wouldn’t be right to conclude this review without mentioning the beautiful contributions in orchestral playing offered by the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra led by Gordan Nikoli?, and the gorgeous multichannel sound offered by PentaTone’s SACD recording. There are many wonderful recordings of Mozart’s concertos to choose from—personal favorites include those by Murray Perahia, Robert Casadesus, Alfred Brendel, Richard Goode, Christian Zacharias, and Matthias Kirschnereit—but Martin Helmchen easily earns a highly valued place among them. Very strongly recommended.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

MOZART Piano Concertos Nos. 12–14 (arr. unknown) • Anne-Marie McDermott (pn); Calder Qrt; David J. Grossman (db) • BRIDGE 9403 (75:54)


From Wikipedia, regarding Concertos No. 11-13: “arrangements exist for them for piano plus string quartet that lose little,” with no indication if those arrangements are by Mozart or not. Nothing is said in the liner notes about these or the string quintet reduction of Concerto No. 14. Yet a review of a similar recording, made by pianist Jean-Phillippe Collard for EMI in 1988 at allmusic.com, indicates that the arangements are Mozart’s own, “his justification for doing them was that if he didn’t, someone else would.” To ears used to a full orchestral accompaniment, the sound is a little strange at first—we keep waiting for orchestral tuttis that never arrive—but the bottom line is whether or not the performances are musically convincing and valid, and for me they are, particularly since Anne-Marie McDermott, one of the truly great American pianists of our time, seems to be using a lean-sounding if modern piano (possibly a Baldwin of the type favored by Glenn Gould?), and these lean, crisp sonorities play well against the string quartet (and quintet in the case of No. 14).


The concertos nos. 12 and 13 (presented on the CD in reverse order) are not among Mozart’s most profound compositions in this genre, but rather fall into the category of music that the cynical composer described to his father in a letter: “These concertos (Nos. 11–13) are a happy medium between what is too easy and too difficult; they are very brilliant, pleasing to the ear, and natural without being vapid….In order to win applause one must write stuff which is so inane that a coachman could sing it, or so unintelligible that it pleases precisely because no reasonable man can understand it.” (This quote, again, from Wikipedia.)


McDermott, producing an appropriately light yet well-inflected sound throughout most of each concerto, really lets herself go in the first-movement cadenzas, and it is here that she separates herself from the more delicate, almost prissy Mozart interpreters on record. Not that she attacks the keyboard as if the music were by Beethoven (though she certainly has the power to do so), but because she understands that the nature of these cadenzas was to stand out and assert center stage, however briefly.


As Mozart indicated, concertos 12 and 13 aren’t exactly profound music. Despite some nicely subtle passages (he never wrote anything that did not have such sections within them), they tend to be lightweight works, designed, as he so aptly put it, “to please” without unduly challenging the average listener’s mind. Yet when the music does turn profound, as it does (quite dramatically so) in the Andante of No. 12, McDermott and the Calder Quartet are up to the challenge. Here, their playing includes a great deal of coloration in addition to the subtlest of modifications within the beats, producing an exquisite musical flow.


The Concerto No. 14 inhabits an entirely different musical world. This is richer, deeper, more mature Mozart, the music alternating in mood between “prettiness” (you’ve got to please the public!) and darker, more penetrating depths, and oddly enough this also applies to the first-movement cadenza. Mozart wisely adds a double bass to the proceedings here; it is necessary to counterbalance the thematic material and its development with a richer texture. This performance alone is worth the price of the CD: it is worthy of the music in every way. Note, particularly, Mozart’s subtle yet dramatic use of descending chromatics and his equally impressive use of what one might call grace notes played as part of the overall structure.


This is an excellent album of its type, although your willingness to acquire it will naturally depend on how many other versions you have of these concertos and whether or not you’d like to have them in chamber music arrangements. Recommended nevertheless.


FANFARE: Lynn René Bayley

Includes concerto(s) for piano by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Ensembles: Czech Chamber Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. Conductor: Václav Neumann. Soloist: Ivan Moravec.

Mozart conceived the 3 piano concerti KV 414, 413, and 415 in 1782, one year after he had settled in Vienna as a more or less free-lance musician. From onset, his idea was to get these works published; he obviously expected a positive response from the public, not only on the financial level but also as a composer and piano virtuoso. In order to enhance the attraction for his publication, he decided to write these concertos in such a way that they could be performed not only with full orchestra, but also with a reduced accompaniment of only string quartet. Clearly, Mozart did not consider this strategic starting point as an artistic limitation, but rather as a challenge: in fact, already the score without the wind parts should leave nothing to be desired. This resulted in a very careful and beautiful string writing, matching the solo part in the most effective and intimate way. The wind parts were then conceived to accentuate and “color” certain passages in the accompaniment with even more depth. For this recording, Sigiswald Kuijken replaces the cello with a double-bass as its role is purely that of a basso continuo. This is a new and exciting release in the discography of La Petite Bande.

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REVIEW:

There are so many recordings of Mozart piano concertos already available, that it might be hard to see where this one might fit in. Suffice it to say that, if you’re looking for these three concertos together, are interested in far-more-intimate playing, though which still respects the raison d’être of the concerto-form, and an instrumental sound as close to what audiences might have heard at the time, then this new CD is definitely an attractive proposition. Couple this with a superb performance, and recording – which sounds perfectly fine even on my bog-standard CD player – then this should be more than enough to sway the balance.

– MusicWeb International

Along with Schnabel, in the first half of the 20th century Edwin Fischer was generally regarded as the greatest interpreter of the Germanic classics - Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms. This was the period when recording came of age, and many first recorded performances, regarded as definitive in their time and still thought amongst the greatest even today, were set down by Fischer. Supreme among them were the first complete recording of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and the Mozart concertos presented here.

These are the only Mozart concerto recordings Fischer was to make commercially except for a LP remake of the D minor in 1954. Their status is such that they should never be out of the catalogue, and we are delighted therefore to reissue these APR transfers (previously on APR5523, 5524 & 5525) as a budget priced 3CD set. Also included are most of Fisher’s solo recordings of Mozart and his only recording of a Haydn concerto.

- APR Recordings

This selection is a High Definition Compatible Digital (HDCD) recording.

This Blu-ray Disc is only playable on Blu-ray Disc players and not compatible with standard DVD players.

Also available on standard DVD

The Austrian piano virtuoso Rudolf Buchbinder, a known expert of Mozart plays and conducts three of Mozart’s most beloved piano concertos together with the Staatskapelle Dresden, where he was the first pianist to hold the title of “Capell-Virtous”. In advance to an extensive tour to Germany, Europe and Asia the concert was recorded in Dresden in an unique setting, being the first ultra-high definition recording of this work: especially for this purpose a stage was set up right inside the Gläserne Manufaktur, a luxury car manufacturer in the heart of the city of Dresden.

No. of Discs: 1
Run time: 93 minutes
Disc Format: BD 50
Picture: 16:9, HD
Audio: PCM Stereo, PCM 5.1
Region Code: 0 (worldwide)

MOZART Piano Concertos: No. 18; No. 22 • Imogen Cooper (pn); Northern Sinf • AVIE AV2200 (66:20)


Both Imogen Cooper and her playing of Mozart need no introduction to regular readers of Fanfare. Colin Clarke recently did a feature review with her regarding a new Schubert recording project in 33:6. Michael Ullman reviewed previously released discs of Mozart concertos in 30:5 (Nos. 9 and 23) and 32:1 (Nos. 24 and 25); the latter were also reviewed by Evan Dickerson in 32:3. All the reviews were quite positive, though Ullman did not find that her performances were quite on the same level as classic accounts by Schnabel and Gieseking.


My reaction to this latest CD issue is very similar to that of Ullman, though I will accentuate the positive to a greater degree. For me at least, such comparisons have become more difficult to make because of the far-reaching changes that period-instrument performances have brought to our understanding and expectations of Mozart interpretation. For example, while the Northern Sinfonia plays on modern instruments, it employs minimal string vibrato and the woodwinds are more pungent, creating a leaner sonority that emphasizes rhythmic crispness and harmonic tartness over melodic warmth. There is also considerably less use of rubato for expressive effect. For those accustomed to, say, the fuller sound and romantic warmth of a Bruno Walter (a personal touchstone in Mozart), any performance adopting or influenced by period practices risks sounding less expressive. In moving from one to the other, I personally must make a conscious effort to adjust my aesthetic expectations and look for the type of interpretive expressiveness apropos of the performance style in question.


On their own grounds, these performances succeed quite well indeed. Led by first violinist Bradley Creswick, the conductorless Northern Sinfonia plays with exemplary ensemble and balance. Cooper is about as elegant a Mozartian as one could want; her touch is delicate and crystalline, her runs fluent and seamless, and she makes very sparing use of the pedal. Interpretively she stresses the graceful elements of the music, but is by no means superficial or slighting of those moments requiring more gravitas. If the slow movement of K 482 does not have the sheer weight and darkness brought to it by, say, Barenboim in his classic EMI recording with the English Chamber Orchestra, it is still effective on its own terms. Above all, there is a relaxed, singing quality to her playing; even though the timings of the movements are virtually identical to those of several other performances with which I made comparisons, they have a more leisurely, almost playful feel to them, without seeming to drag in the slightest. The recorded sound is clear and not too closely miked, which adds a bit of warmth and takes the edge off the leaner string sound. My one complaint is that the booklet notes include gushy puff-piece overviews of Cooper and the Sinfonia of the sort found in concert program brochures, at the expense of more substantive comments on the music. But those seeking recordings of Mozart piano concertos that reflect the best melding of modern instruments and period-performance practice can turn to this disc with complete confidence.


FANFARE: James A. Altena