Vlado Perlemuter Mozart Piano Sonatas (2007)

Something about the key of D major seems to trigger off Mitsuko Uchida's adrenalin. The energy level in the Rondo and the earlier of the sonatas here is accordingly high, and…she has the technique and temperament to make musical sense of her chosen tempos… It is the long variation movement concluding the D major Sonata…where Uchida achieves marvels of shading within a steadily maintained basic pulse… B flat major draws more serenity out of Uchida. In the Sonata, K570, her energy is applied in all the right places and her response to the tonal scheme of the first movement development is especially acute.

Anne-Sophie Mutter is joined in by André Previn and cellist Daniel Müller-Schott for these performances of the finest of Mozart's Piano Trios, filmed in Mantua's magnificent 18th-century Teatro Bibiena. "The outstanding musicians making music in an affectionate and elegant way" (International Record Review). "Mutter's warm tone and her subtle gradations of vibrato are a constant pleasure" (BBC Music Magazine).

Vlado Perlemuter's association with the piano music of Ravel contributed considerably to his international celebrity - and yet at the same time it obscured the scope of an art that also resonated closely with the musical worlds of Chopin, Fauré, Debussy, and indeed with Schumann, Beethoven, Liszt and Mozart. The sobriety and reserve of Perlemuter's playing were often taken for coldness by a public that proved to be more sensitive to the flamboyance of an Alfred Cortot or a Samson François than to the poetry of an art made up of the tension of self-effacement before the ineffable quality of the work. However, his peers were not wrong, from Arthur Rubinstein to Yehudi Menuhin, from Dinu Lipatti to Henri Barda, from Pierre Boulez to Claudio Arrau.

I was interested to see that the Toccata from Pour le Piano comes not from the December 1985 session but from one made in May the following year. I assume either he didn’t record it in December or (more likely?) he was dissatisfied with the results. Inevitably Perlemuter slowed as he aged. There is a BBC broadcast of Pour le piano from 1968 (issued in the BBC Music Magazine) in which things are very much more vital and zestful, in which articulation is crisper and the results very different from the invariably more laboured playing here.

This is a disc of music by Turkish-born pianist Fazil Say – one can't really say by Haydn. It's hard to blame Say for his well-known antics, which most famously include humming along with something other than the melody. Modern marketing is all about filling niches, and the one once occupied by Glenn Gould is wide open. As with Gould, Say doubtless brings something important to music where he achieves a meeting of minds with the composer. But it doesn't happen with Haydn. The delicate balance of these earlier Haydn sonatas is shattered by Say's capricious shifts in tempo and accent and his far overwrought treatments of Haydn's deadpan, often neo-Baroque slow movements.