Unheard Mozart - two new sonatas & other unfinished works for piano solo

Mozart's huge output includes a number of works that for various different reasons were left in an incomplete state at the time of his death. The best-known, of course, are the Requiem and the Mass in C minor, but as this fascinating and beautifully recorded disc demonstrates, his output of keyboard music contains much of substance that unfortunately survives in a fragmentary state.

Pianist Anthony Goldstone has done a sterling job in realising, reconstructing and completing these fragments, as well as performing them with great musical sensitivity. The most famous example here is the D minor Fantasy, where Goldstone's conclusion, which returns to the opening brooding arpeggios, seems far more convincing and compositionally satisfying that any other alternatives. Likewise, the improvisatory Präludium in C major, which binds together two separate fragments, sounds extremely cogent and stylistically idiomatic.

A more controversial ploy is Goldstone's realisation of two complete piano sonatas assembled form movements that were not necessarily intended to be performed together. Although purists will no doubt object to Goldstone's idea of transcribing the G major Variations for Piano Duet so as to form the Finale of the "G minor Sonata", that will be to ignore the fact that Mozart himself was perfectly prepared to adopt this strategy if it suited his purposes.
Performance ××××× Sound ×××××
(BBC Music Instrumental Choice, October 2007)

"Anthony Goldstone has no inhibitions about "Unheard Mozart", piano pieces that have been unheard because Mozart hadn't completed them. Goldstone has developed and expanded beginnings or fragments that, in the words of Julian Rushton, had been "put away in the certainty that if the need arose he could finish them later; what was already written, the exposition of ideas, would act as a mnemonic".

Finishing Mozart needn't be a sacrilegious act, as may be heard in the small pieces, particularly the Praeludium in C major. Doubts surface about the large forms, the Sonatas in F major and G minor. Goldstone's editions are prolix, burdened by padding that deflects attention. Nor is his playing - matter-of-fact in the Minuet K34 and Gigue in C minor - always sympathetic to his best creative efforts. When it is, as in the Fantasia K397 with his own ending, he makes for very absorbing listening. But the unevenness of inspiration in Mozart's uncompleted material suggests that if some ideas could act as a mnemonic, others might simply have been abandoned because they had not reached the standards he expected of himself."
(Gramophone)