Mitsuko Uchida English Chamber Orchestra Jeffrey Tate

The virtues of Uchida's playing are the ones classically associated with Mozart: grace, fluidity, restraint, and a certain playful quality. Those are all on display in these performances of Mozart concertos from the 1770s, early in the composer's career. Uchida's style is more concerned with small details than with large spaces, and this puts her somewhat out of the mainstream in a work like the Piano Concertos

The virtues of Uchida's playing are the ones classically associated with Mozart: grace, fluidity, restraint, and a certain playful quality. Those are all on display in these performances of Mozart concertos from the 1770s, early in the composer's career. Uchida's style is more concerned with small details than with large spaces, and this puts her somewhat out of the mainstream in a work like the Piano Concerto No. 9 in E flat major, K. 271 – many performances recorded since the 1992 date of Uchida's version have emphasized the way a vast architecture suddenly appeared in the mind of the young composer. Still, there are many lovely details, often connected to Uchida's way of bringing out the various wrinkles in the concerto's left-hand parts.

For her fifth live recording of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's piano concertos with the Cleveland Orchestra, Mitsuko Uchida presents the Piano Concerto No. 17 in G major, K 453, and the Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major, K 503, a delightful pairing that reflects her previous albums in this critically acclaimed series on Decca.

Two arias include obbtigato instruments. The violin version of the better known setting of the same text with piano obbligato k505. It is the soprano version of the long aria sung by an mezzo or tenor Idamante in Idomeneo. While not quite as phenomenally beautiful as k505, it is both lively and demanding, requiring virtuoso contributions from conductor, orchestra, violinist and soprano. For k505, best that I have heard is Ameling/Dalton Baldwin/Edo de Waart (see my review). Hendricks/Tate/Jose Luis Garcia and the ECO are equally good in the violin setting.