Oversteps

This 2008 Hyperion disc called A Mozart Album programmed and performed by English pianist Stephen Hough is a model recital. The disc starts with pure Mozart, the Fantasia in C minor, K. 475, and the Sonata in B flat major K. 333, then moves to not so pure Mozart, a Fantasia in C minor, K. 396, begun by Mozart but finished after his death by Maximillian Stadler. After that, there are three Mozartian virtuoso pastiches, Johann Baptist Cramer's Hommage à Mozart and Ignaz Friedman's Menuetto in D major from the Divertimento for strings and horns, K. 334, plus Hough's own Three Mozart Transformations (after Poulenc): the Menuet, K. 1; Klavierstücke, K. 333; and Sehnsucht nach dem Frühling, K. 596.

The Labeque sisters are not alone! For Guher and Suher Pekinel are twins and piano duettists by which I also mean that they play works for two pianos. Looking at their names, I wondered about their nationality, and the booklet tells us that they are in fact ''of mixed Turkish/Spanish parentage'' and that from the age of about ten their training was at the Paris Conservatoire, the Frankfurt Musikhochschule, under Rudolf Serkin at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and finally at the Juilliard School, New York.