Piano Concertos - Complete

"This is the same set as previously reviewed by my esteemed MusicWeb colleague Kirk McElhearn, here repackaged with a new number. As can be seen, it consists of four recordings boxed together.

First I will discuss the complete numbered solo piano concertos performed by Derek Han accompanied by Paul Freeman and the Philharmonia Orchestra. Overall, these performances are excellent. Try, for instance, #5, the earliest work which consists entirely of original Mozart music. The rich orchestral texture with bold brass fanfares is beautifully presented and recorded and Han's technique is bright and youthful. Simpson has made an extensive study of this work and his recording restores the original orchestration while giving us a new cadenza, and Han/Freeman achieve similar results.

And with the much later #20 in d, the most popular of all Mozart's piano concertos the full orchestral textures and tragic mood are fully manifest. Of course with a work as often recorded as this everyone will have his or her favourite version (mine remains the Artur Rubinstein performance with Josef Krips, with honourable mention going to Serkin/Abbado, the second and third movements only) but this Derek Han version will probably be almost everybody's close second. It avoids inappropriate excess romanticism and is clearly and cleanly played and recorded without any thinness.

The superlative Barenboim recording of the last two concerti is remarkable for its perfect balance of sound and style; Barenboim's cadenzas are interesting if a little blatant in their quotations from The Marriage of Figaro. By comparison, Han/Freeman play with a little less assurance, but with more youthful enthusiasm. Han/Freeman's orchestral perspective has the piano closer which also adds a sense of immediacy, making the Barenboim with its very realistic concert hall acoustic sound by comparison more remote, more formal.

The piano concerto "#7" is remarkable in being for three pianos, and in that the "third" piano part is very simple, which fact no doubt led Mozart to merge it into the other two piano parts and write out a version for two pianos which has the same K number. The original three piano version is here performed here by Zoltan Kocsis, Dezsö Ranki, and András Schiff and the Hungarian State Orchestra conducted by János Ferencsik. The other concerto on this disk was originally written for two pianos and is "#10" in the complete series, here performed by Zoltan Kocsis and Dezsö Ranki, accompanied as above. Kocsis and Schiff are among the very finest of pianists and Ferencsik also has many, many fine recordings to his credit. Then, why are these performances so uninvolving? Sometimes such things are utterly unspecifiable. I am reminded of another recording of a Mozart Piano Concerto by world famous artists where the first movement doesn't work at all, whereas the second and third are among the finest versions of the work ever played; and there, as here, one is mystified to explain it. The best I can suggest is that the problems come from the pianos being recorded too close and the orchestra sounding distant, choppy, and monotonous, with too many missed opportunities for the soloists and orchestra to trade phrases and sing to each other, so it may be mostly the recording engineers' fault. The recording is remarkably clear and the stereo separation exemplary; if you are a pianist memorising these piano parts you couldn't have a better recording to work with.

The concert rondos are here performed by Annerose Schmidt accompanied by the Dresden Philharmonia conducted by Kurt Masur. Each of these was probably conceived as an alternate movement for one of the earlier concerti, K 382 for K 175, and K 386 for K414, and hence shame on Han/Freeman for not including them in his series as did, for example, Murray Perahia and Mitsuko Uchida/Jeffrey Tate. Indeed K 382 is one of Mozart's most popular and frequently heard works. However Schmidt and Masur give us fine performances, probably even a little better than would be performances by Han and Freeman, so we have nothing whatever to complain about.

Lastly, we come to the first works in this set, the very early orchestrations of the J. C. Bach Sonatas. These works, along with the numbered concerti 1 through 4, belong in Mozart's catalogue of arrangements along with his orchestration of Handel's Messiah, his string versions of Bach keyboard fugues. They are clearly Baroque trio sonatas, but they just as clearly look forward to the Classical era to come. Fascinating, charming works they could not be better played or recorded than here, especially as accompanied by excellent clavichord performances of the original sonatas. This disk is a must-have for any serious Mozart collector and it appears that this disk is currently not available in any other format"
(MusicWeb June 2004)