Mozart

Music : Classical : Lossless

Here we have in lossless format the complete piano sonatas, complete piano concertos and as a little bonus the Requiem Mass of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.



Played and conducted by maestro Barenboim.



Piano Sonatas:



It is something near to a cleansing experience to listen through the Mozart piano repertoire as performed by Daniel Barenboim.



For starters, Mozart achieves his sparest, cleanest, most limpid lines when writing for solo piano. Then comes Daniel Barenboim, whose reading of Mozart is crisply and unemotionally classical. Not for him the drawn-out keyboard soliloquy. On the contrary, Barenboim gives us Mozart, only Mozart, and nothing but Mozart, clean and shimmering as sparkling mineral water.



This is not to say that Barenboim as pianist is unfeeling. On the contrary, the Fantasia in C Minor - to choose just one example with almost random lack of care - is quite moving. But not with a flourish. Rather, with almost sinewy restraint. The presentation represents a fine grasp of the master composer, nurtured with discipline across the length and breadth of the voluminous sonatas.



Indeed, the sheer volume of the Mozart piano sonatas is intimidating. It is astonishing to imagine one man having mastered it as Barenboim has.



If Mozart is a musician for the ages and Barenboim a performer who left a formidable imprint on the twentieth century, their collaboration as represented in these recordings is a watershed that will need to be referenced by students of classical piano for at least another hundred years.

Piano Concertos:



Mozart's piano concertos occupy a very special place amongst his works. Circumstances enabled him to become regarded in Vienna as composer and performer when he presented twelve of the later concertos to an appreciative audience in Vienna in the 1780s. His letters reveal how personal and important these works were to him. The piano concertos also show how he could imbue a musical form with a depth and a breadth that no one before, and few since, has encompassed.



The recordings were made at London's Abbey Road Studios between 1967 and 1974 with the English Chamber Orchestra. In CD form the performances were re-released, sounding warm, natural and detailed, in 1998. All the solo piano concertos are here, together with two rondos for piano and orchestra.



Other pianists might produce a better effect here or there, or provide different inflections and nuances that are appropriate, but Barenboim's interpretations seem to me to be totally satisfying. He uses what Mozart cadenzas have survived and elsewhere provides either his own or those written by creative keyboard players of an earlier generation such as Edwin Fischer and Wanda Landowska.



Recordings have not yet been able to capture the spatial dynamics that seems so magical at an actual performance of a Mozart piano concerto. You can't yet hear and see that only the wind section of the orchestra is playing, or that the trumpet is announcing from the back of the stage that the D Minor Concerto is about to finish. Meanwhile, recordings such as this will help keep great music alive in your head and your home.

Requiem Mass:



Anyone who's ever listened to Mozart's Requiem knows it can move from dark and haunting to fantastic and thrilling in the course of a few measures. It's not that often that one finds a performance of the Requiem that truly delivers on this characteristic of Mozart's Requiem. The entire piece is executed perfectly, but pay particular attention to the Dies Irae, Tuba Mirum, Recordare Jesu Pie, and Lacrymosa movements, they are beautiful and inspiring beyond belief.



Enjoy and Seed!!