K Drama School

At the age of 22, Mozart was bemoaning lost love and decided to ‘apply myself conscientiously to the clavier duets’, He finished the full set of six Sonatas for Piano – with Violin – in the summer of 1778 and dedicated to the Countess Elizabeth Auguste, Electress of Palatine and Bavaria. They have become known as the ‘Palatine Sonatas’ and are the earliest (relatively) mature works in this instrumental combination, his first essays in the form being at the age of ten. As piano sonatas with violin (as opposed to the Violin Sonatas of later musical eras) these pieces have exquisite balance and are in fact wonderful in every sense; a pure joy. They are dazzlingly colourful, full of drama and emotion. The artists were particularly keen to present these works in an authentic ambience, as in an 18th century salon, and the result is a beautiful balance and intimacy. Peter Sheppard Skærved is a world renowned violinist, author, musicologist, artist and researcher.

The ensemble of “trio d’anches” featuring the oboe, clarinet, and bassoon was first established in the 1920s and features on this brand new recording on SACD with the glorious music of Mozart arranged by Ulf-Guido Schäfer. His trio has now been recorded on the big sound of this Super Audio CD - a revelation for specialists in the field of wind chamber music.

If you can tolerate Dirk Vermeulen’s rigidly vibrato-less strings versus winds and brass that play with far more color, expression, and, yes, a smidgen of vibrato, it is worth the effort for pianist Klára Würtz’s incandescent handling of the Mozart K. 271 and K. 467 concertos’ solo parts. She consistently shapes echoed phrases with contrast and character, and creates appropriate vocal-inspired tension in the slow-movement melodies’ wide interval leaps.

Involving, as it does, three master musicians and a fine chamber orchestra this was never likely to be be other than rewarding. It may not correspond with the ways of playing Mozart at the beginning of the twenty-first century which are fashionable at the beginning of the twenty-first century, but it has virtues – such as high intelligence, sympathy, certainty of purpose, grace, alertness of interplay – which transcend questions of performance practice. Looking at the names of the pianists above, we might be surprised by the presence of Sir Georg Solti, so used are we to thinking of him as a conductor. But the young Solti appeared in public as a pianist from the age of twelve and went on to study piano in Budapest, with Dohnányi and Bartok.