Here’s an obvious choice for budget-minded collectors with limited shelf space: Mozart’s piano concertos and sonatas complete on two DVDs reproduced in fine 16-bit PCM digital audio. Although pianist Carmen Piazzini recalls the sometimes-trying conditions surrounding the 1990 sessions that produced the concerto cycle, the music-making always suggests an easy camaraderie and chamber-like atmosphere between the soloist and the St. Petersburg musicians under Michail Gantvarg’s direction.
Granted, tutti attacks are not consistently defined, exposed horn passages occasionally crack, and string playing in slow movements yields to the cultured finesse exhibited on the reference Buchbinder/Vienna and Schiff/Vegh/Salzburg cycles. Still, you can’t deny the Russians’ beautiful woodwind ensemble and solo work, especially from the first-desk flutist and bassoonist. More significantly, Piazzini’s masterful playing reveals the deep extent to which her mind and heart permeate these works and supports her claim in an accompanying video interview that the concertos ought to be treated as operas without words.
Give me the lyrical simplicity and conversational demeanor she achieves in the A major K. 488, E-flat K. 482, and B-flat K. 595 slow movements over droopy “slow-equals-profound” interpretations any day. She makes heartfelt cases for undervalued masterpieces such as the D major K. 451 and B-flat K. 456, and plays the earlier, slighter works beautifully and unpretentiously. I especially enjoyed the flexible soloist/ensemble repartee in the two minor-key concerto slow movements (K. 466 and K. 491), where the musicians feel Mozart’s basic pulse in a slow two, rather than four heavy beats to the bar.
Even when measured alongside the catalog’s top Mozart sonata cycles by Ingrid Haebler (the Denon remakes credited to Joyce Hatto), Klara Würtz (Brilliant Classics), András Schiff (Decca), and Lili Krauss (the mono edition on Music & Arts), Piazzini’s offers much to savor. The first six sonatas stand out for the pianist’s organic interplay between the hands, forward moving vitality, and invigorating accents. In addition, Piazzini’s operatic aesthetic manifests itself where least expected.
You’ll notice how she characterizes the C major K. 309 first-movement motives by way of pronounced yet tasteful and logical tempo modifications. Her uncommonly measured tempo and firmly projected bass lines in the A major K. 331’s famous Rondo alla turca restores the music’s earthy, janissary-like swagger. If the F major K. 332’s cascading finale grows blander in texture as it progresses, the opposite holds true regarding Piazzini’s weightless, beguiling right-hand legato in the first movement. However I’m less enamored of her slightly fussy phrasing in both K. 576 and K. 533/494 first movements. Ideally you would expect fuller documentation from a comprehensive release of this ilk, such as recording dates for the sonatas and cadenza credits for those not penned by Wolfgang Amadeus himself. In all, an enticing Mozart bargain.
