Mozart Piano

This Decca 2CD set of Beethoven and Mozart recordings, issued along with a companion box that contains the other four Beethoven piano concertos (240 822-2), makes an apt memorial tribute to a pianist who stands as one of the ‘Great Pianists of the Century’. Katchen quite properly features in the distinguished series of recordings marketed by Universal under that title. His achievement might have been greater still but for the cancer claimed him in 1969 at the tragically early age of forty-two.

This is the second installment in Orli Shaham's complete Mozart sonatas cycle and follows her recording of the Mozart Violin Sonatas with brother, violinist Gil Shaham, and her acclaimed release of Mozart Piano Concertos, conducted by David Robertson and the St. Louis Symphony. Mozart's singing line and it's translation to the piano has served as Orli Shaham's constant guide in her interpretations of Mozart. The artistic genius in Mozart is that he leaves the performer to capture the mood in the music, and this Orli Shaham does with aplomb, the studio environment for this recording encouraging her to experiment with ornamentation, adding or subtracting trills and grace notes with successive takes. Recording in her favorite recording venue, Mechanics Hall, she fully explores the pathos and cultivates the humor in Mozart's B-flat sonatas.

In 2010 Yevgeny Sudbin released the first instalment in a cycle of Beethoven's piano concertos. Featuring the Fourth and the Fifth concerto the disc received top marks on web sites such as ClassicsToday.com and klassik-heute.de and was selected CD of the Week in Daily Telegraph and Editor's Choice in Gramophone, whose reviewer wrote 'The mother-of-pearl sheen of [Sudbin's] pianism is backed by a special underlying sensitivity…Delectably light-fingered brilliance and virtuosity shines a new light on some of the most familiar scores in the repertoire…'

It is wonderful that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is experiencing a surge of support in 2006, the 250th anniversary of his birth. For many listeners, it is a matter of embracing what is already out there in terms of Mozart's music, certainly not all of the 800-plus compositions that have come down from his prodigious pen, but generally of the 25 or so works that constitute his "hits." Nevertheless, these pieces are so prevalent that one cannot be blamed for wondering what is "new" that Mozart has to offer. One could dig into his canons, opera aria inserts, and other obscurities in search of undiscovered jewels, and truly, there are some remarkable and fulfilling items to be found there.

"Having listened for over half a century to tens of thousands of recordings of Mozart’s music, be it piano music, string quartets, symphonies, operas, et al, I have been hugely energised by these recordings, not because they are so great, but because they are so terrible!"