MOZART Piano Sonatas K.330/ 332/ 457/ 331

 

Mikhail Pletnev 

 

Mikhail Pletnev fuels Mozart year 2006 with his first solo Mozart recital!

 

In the hands of the Russian piano legend, Mozart's sonatas take on new shades of colour and meaning as Mikhail Pletnev's favorite Mozart sonatas appear for the first time on CD.

 

If anything lends itself to high expectations, then it must be this meeting of minds: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Mikhail Pletnev. On the one hand: Mozart, the playful Classicist; on the other: Pletnev, the free Romantic. Everything points to an explosive mix.

 

As his fans have come to hope and expect, the Maestro has delivered a very individual reading of Mozart's music.''An artist without intuition would do better to become a bookkeeper,'' Pletnev has said. ''Mozart? I play him just as I hear him''.

 

Pletnev recorded all four sonatas in one night on a Blüthner concert grand. The result: an intensity and intimacy that reveal Mozart works in a new light.

Mozart’s 250th birthday falls on Friday, so the record companies are having a field day. We are hardly short of versions of the three sonatas K330-332 — the middle one, in A major, concludes with Mozart’s most famous piece for solo piano, the “Rondo alla Turca” — or the great C minor work, K457, but Pletnev is a pianist with something to say about the most well-worn repertoire. The three earlier sonatas are now thought to have been written later than previously assumed, in Salzburg in 1783, as Mozart was preparing to leave for Vienna, while the C minor belongs to his “miraculous” decade: a fully fledged masterpiece, looking forward to Beethoven and beyond. Pletnev’s Mozart may not have the effortless fluency of Brendel’s, Uchida’s or Schiff’s, but he adopts a personal approach, now unfashionable in this music, with a playful, improvisatory approach to rhythm and tempo. Some Mozartians may find his rubati mannered, but there are rewards in the deeply felt, singing adagios of the F major and C minor sonatas, and in the diamantine brilliance he brings to his passage work throughout in allegros.
Times, Four stars

 

Deutsche Grammophon 4775788

Listen:

Sonata in C-Dur KV 330: III. Allegretto

Listen:

Sonata in F-Dur KV 332: II. Adagio

Listen:

Sonata in c minor K. 457 III. Allegro assai

Listen:

Sonata in a minor K. 331 III. Alla Turca - Allegretto